Making a Web Page

Geraniums
Computer drawing by Jo, drawn with the Mac program and Dabble with a mouse. Fun!

Bag Blog asked in a comment about starting a a place to have her art together and be able to browse through her watercolor paintings. I'm thinking a web page. Maybe this post will give her some ideas.

Why not start with a little history. When I started my web page, we had AOL for an internet provider and they host free space for their members. Their templates were for PCs and because I had a Mac, I could not take advantage of that. I had a small program that came with a printer, I think, called Adobe Page Mill. I started making my page per the directions with that program (which I still use) and put it on AOL. Then AOL up and changed my page to Frames with no warning. The web site name was very long as well, something like "homepage/aolhometown/jocastilloart.com or some such which I couldn't remember much less pass it on to others. I decided to plunge in and buy my domain name and go with another server.

I bought my domain name and started my page with Cedant. They have been so inexpensive and have much more technical help than I ever needed. I pay something like $7 a month by paying a year in advance. They have only been down once for a few hours that I remember in about 10 years. Pretty consistent. They also have templates and all sorts of advanced things that I don't use. If you do use them or need more space, the cost goes up, of course. You need some knowledge of html and how things work, but they will help you.

There are some free providers. Sitekreator is one. This internet provider is popular with artists on wetcanvas.com. José Carriho in Portugal is a good example. He has been happy with his web site.

Something I would recommend now, is Fine Art America. It does not require any knowledge of html or codes. I have a web page there for free. It is super easy to use. You can put up about 85 paintings or photos and a bio. You can scroll through them with comments and prices. You can list your events and have a blog. The blog part is new and doesn't offer the perks that Blogger has that I can see, I put up a post today, so I need to see if there were comments. They do have a discussion forum. They have started something new that I haven't looked into yet for selling prints of your work, called print on demand. With framing, the prints are more than my original painting, Ha. So I probably won't use that. There is a charge for that service. The advantage is, that it is promoted well to artists and galleries and now to public collectors. I think it will really grow and may help with sales. On your private control panel you can see where people are that look at your work and they can comment on each painting. Take a look. As an artist just starting a page, it looks great. No cost .. at least at the moment.

Fine Art Studio Online is a very good one, but it has charges. It is very easy to use, too. About $24 a month for a good size website. They do publicize more. I read their marketing newsletter and you can read it, too, free. Subscribe here. They are starting a new section for art collectors with a newsletter especially for them. Rebecca Neef, a great artist in Bastrop, has her page with them. You see she has her own domain name there. I have been thinking about this, the pages look great. Rebecca has sold from there when she was doing animal portraits, but I don't know about now. Maybe a trial run. :)

If you just want to put up photos of your work, you can use Picassa with Google (there is a link from Blogger) or one of the other services like Webshots or Flikr. You can have public or private storage for your work.

There are many ways to go and so many ideas out there. At this point, I am just hoping to streamline my page and make it a little easier to see my artwork. My page has grown almost out of control, don't you know?