Category: Blog Posts

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[ Secret Sketchbook ] Website Redesign Part 3 – Galleries

Part 1 and 2 of this series covered branding and the artist website’s front page.  This entry is all about how to show off the art with the Gallery Index and Pages!

The Gallery Index

When I first built Angelic Shades, I took the barest minimum approach and simply inserted galleries I could easily add using shortcode with the NextGEN Gallery plugin, which lets me add galleries based on tags, albums, etc.  This let me build my site quickly and easily. 

However, this old Gallery Index had some problems:

I had no title text on the page and the very barest description for my series.  For the new site, I spruced up this gallery index by adding the title text with a slightly longer description to conjure a more magical mood for my Angels of the Seasons.  Having more text on this page also makes it more crawlable by search engines looking for relevant terms not just in the meta tags, but in the content, itself.

I also put a call to action on the new layout to encourage people to click and explore the images for more info, since it’s not plainly obvious they are clickable until you hover your mouse over them.  

The thumbnails of the old page were also misaligned due to the masonry-style stacking, which made them uneven since they are not all the exact same size.  I was able to force them all to be the same height and width in the new layout.  The thumbnails also fill up the whole width of the page instead of wasting space so they show up big and beautiful on the page.  I want to showcase the art, not drive people insane with awkward visual blocks!

The Gallery Page

While NextGEN made it easy for me to insert large galleries, the image thumbnails in these galleries would click off to an awkward lightbox that made it difficult to share more about each individual piece.

My aim for the new site was to make each painting’s page more interesting to explore and provide more connection points to my Etsy and Redbubble shops.  I want to turn the viewers of my website into collectors instead of merely treating the site like an archive!

That old lightbox was just ugly!  The whole page was squished, the description was difficult to read, and the rest of the gallery’s thumbnails were hard to see.  The best thing about this lightbox was the Share buttons, which allow people to share the image to their social media accounts.  I need to find a way to add these for my new layout, but for now, I hope to rely on people being able to use browser extensions for this functionality in the new layout.

The Art

First and foremost, I wanted the art to shine on this page!  In the old site’s lightbox, it was squished and awkward in that void.  Back when I first made the old site, I was worried people would pirate my art so I uploaded very small low res images.  However, now that computers have evolved, having detailed paintings at 700 pixels max length looks fuzzy and small on higher resolution displays.  I’ve upped that max length to 1000 pixels and instead chose to use watermarks as a deterrent to piracy.

SIDENOTE: Why watermark art?  Because having a copyright notice is, in my opinion, the most powerful way to say that “These images are all visibly copyrighted on my site” so that an infringer cannot say in court “I did not know they were copyrighted” and feign ignorance.  I also know that my images are going to travel without accompanying text around the internet, especially on places like Pinterest, so it’s good to have my name and url hard coded into them.

The Description

On the new site, I’ve expanded the description of the image.  Doing so makes my art more personal and interesting to viewers, while also populating the content of the webpage with relevant keywords, which search engines like.  I like to let people know a bit about the folklore that inspired my work, any interesting methods I used to make the piece, etc.

Work-In-Progress Sub-Gallery

I’ve also chosen to add a little space where I can feature a peek at a WIP pic or, where available, links to my Sketch Diary blog posts or Patreon posts (thereby letting me pitch my Patreon as well).  Showing that an image took a lot of work raises its perceived value as a piece of art, while also providing those with curiosity the chance to explore your process.

The Featured Product & Original Availability

Showing that the original art is available makes it easier for collectors to snag a piece, while the Featured Product bar lets those who want to add more art to their lives easily find more.  My old site didn’t have any visual products like this and relied on people to dig into the navigation menu to find my shop links.  People do not like digging through complicated menus!

I also chose to put this product bar towards the bottom of the page instead of the top. I don’t want to overwhelm people with a sales pitch as soon as they land on the page.  Now, they can enjoy the art for a minute before getting towards the bottom and picking up something if they feel want to.  Redbubble and Printful have excellent products mockups available that are free to use!

My links go to Etsy and Redbubble since I do not have a native e-cart on my site.  I’ll cover what WordPress tools and themes I’m using in a future entry in this series.

Further Exploration

Finally, I’ve included the full gallery from the collection’s Gallery Index so that this art collection is easy to navigate in!  I want to always provide an easy path for further exploration when I can so that viewers can enjoy their journey through my site. Most people have internet that can handle this amount of images, while modern sites also now have a ‘lazy loading’ functionality which only loads images as a user scrolls down to them, making the loading times a bit easier on folks with less internet speed.

What’s Next?

I’ve got a long ways to go to create individual gallery pages for many of the pieces I want to feature!  While I probably won’t do this for EVERY piece of art in my ever-growing body of work, I want to do it for all of my favorites, especially the ones that have products attached.  

So if you need me, I’ll be chained to the computer forever fiddling with page blocks!

Next, I’ll provide a list of the tools I used for putting my site together.  There are some great ones that people with a bit of web savvy can employ to make great looking sites!

I hope this has given you all some insight into what many artists have to do to maintain their businesses or, if you’re an artist, some ideas for how to tidy up your  own site’s experience!

♥  Ang

[Secret Sketchbook] Website Redesign Part 2 – The Index Page

Part 2 of my Website Redesign series continues!  I discuss the importance of each section on an artist website’s front page, the purpose of the site, and other best practices.  All while using my old and new website design as a visual aid.

Pledge any amount on Patreon to access to this article.  Every little bit helps me to keep doing what I love!

[Secret Sketchbook] Angelic Shades Website Redesign Part 1

With the world of conventions basically cancelled and my insane Kickstarter schedule finally letting up, it’s time to polish my online presence!  Check out this Patreon-only post exploring my in-depth notes discussing how I’m redesigning my Art Nouveau website, including research notes, logo evolution, etc.

Pledge at least $1 to access to this article!  Every little bit helps me to keep doing what I love.

July 2020 Wrap-Up – Big Milestone, Big Burnout

Cross-posted from my Patreon blog

July has ended and it’s been a strange mix of some great milestones here, but also an acknowledgement of my continued struggle with burnout.

To start off, Kev and I packed up the FINAL Kickstarter order after a year and change of consecutive Kickstarter campaigns dedicated to the Birthstone Goddesses enamel pins!

It’s been amazing to see how fans, new and old, have turned out to support this pin series’ creation.  The pins are complete and I am so happy with them!  That’s one big project milestone for the Birthstone Goddesses complete:

(The entire series is now available in my shop!)

Now, we can sit back and get some much needed rest!  This year-long journey has shown me what my limits are as a one-person business and that I just can’t do this all by myself without sacrificing my well-being.  It shows me I can only do two Kickstarters a year at most, and that it’s super important for my creative wells to not sacrifice so much of my time painting to business upkeep, promotion, and project management.

It showed me I was very bad at taking time off as well!  It just wasn’t possible. The last few months I kept trying to take time off, but there was always something in Backerkit that needed setting up, ads to design, proofs to approved, and Kickstarter things to promote before the next deadline.  

So now for vacation take three (or four?), I’m losing count!  Now that there are no more Kickstarter things until next year, I’m taking some ACTUAL true and proper time off!  Reading this article on artists defining and struggling with their burnout really made me pause and think about some specific strategies for myself to set better resting habits!

Our creativity is a muscle that can be strained and it’s a skill they don’t teach in school.  I’m giving myself permission to have fun in August, do non-art crafty projects, and play all the video games!  And THIS TIME I will not have to worry about unavoidable Kickstarter deadlines encroaching on that all-important rest time.

Coming in August

I’ll still be sharing a new coloring page and new art.  I’ll be meandering with fun art, like Anko’s 6 Outfits Challenge, finishing more portraits for my charity drive, and sharing more creative journey posts here, for a little while.  The Birthstone Goddesses are entering their final phase for me and there’s a lot I want to tell you all about where we’re going from here, once I’ve rested a bit!

Digest of July’s Posts

New Rewards Added in July

—

I hope you all won’t mind seeing my continued art diversions here for a little while longer!  The Birthstone Goddesses will return momentarily, but as I’ve been going full steam ahead on them for 6 years (wow!), it’s important that I let it rest for a little while to finish off the final phase with a bang!  I’m planning some very different illustrations to be included in the art book and I am SO excited to get into something that’s less Mucha and more ME.

More soon!

 ♥ Ang