Last week, I showed you some artists that have great homes on the web. As an artist, it’s important to have a web presence because it is often the most effective way to connect with potential clients and fans.

No one cares how good you are if they don’t know who you are. For this post, I collaborated with my colleague and friend (oh, and brother), Teague Hopkins, MBA student at Babson’s Graduate School of Business to show creative-minded people how to get their own website.

Plot of Land

Just like you need a plot of land to build a house on, the physical space where you store the files that make up your website is your web host. Some domain registrars also offer web hosting, and while the integration may be appealing, it can make it more difficult to switch if you should have problems with either in the future. Web hosts come in a variety of flavors, but most small sites just getting started will choose shared hosting. Shared hosting simply means the web host is using one server to host multiple sites. This makes it less expensive.

By Olof on Flickr

A couple of businesses that offer shared hosting are BlueHost and DreamHost. Shared hosting for either of these runs about $6/month, and may require a one- or two-year contract. While both of these companies offer unlimited bandwidth and storage space, you should check these two numbers if you choose to find a different host. Storage or hosting space is the equivalent of our square footage, and simply governs the amount of stuff that you can put on your web host.

Bandwidth doesn’t have a direct analog in our physical building analogy, but in talking about web hosts it is a measure of the amount of data transferred to and from your web host in a given month. A large number of people downloading large files from your website will use a lot of bandwidth.

Once you have both a host and a domain name, you can log into your registrar’s control panel to point your domain to your new host.

Merchandise

Once your building (CMS) is up and running, the last step is to move in. Add content to your site through your CMS and check out your new website! Tell all your friends. Add links to your website to your profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

There are limitless possibilites for what to do next, but this is the extent of this primer. If you have questions about anything you read here, please leave a comment and we’ll try to answer it or point you to some more comprehensive resources. I hope you found this introduction helpful and send me an email once you’re moved in!

Designing a website for an artist is difficult. Artists are creative, playful, unique, quirky, strange, and often mildly insane. And they want their websites to be creative, playful, unique, quirky, strange, and often mildly insane.

Which is great!

However, before you go and create your cultural production of an allegorically strata-transcending disembodied experience (that’s how us artists say “website”), take a step back and make sure you have the 6 key elements of a well-designed website.

FrankChimero.com

1. Straight-forward, consistent navigation that tells exactly what the site offers

Frank Chimero is a graphic designer and illustrator. The navigation of his website is clean and simple. A website is not a labyrinth to be discovered. The main navigation should be consistent on every page so that the viewer never gets lost. The goal is for the viewer not to have to press the back button.

JaneArt.com

2. A homepage that says who you are and what you do

The homepage should say right off the bat something about you and your work. On Jane’s homepage, there are examples of her work, a blurb that describes her passion for painting, and a title image that has her full name followed by “paintings”. These are subtle things, but I know immediately that Jane is a painter and I can see what kind of paintings she does.

NatashaWescoat.com

3. A space that promotes participation

Give your viewers a chance to participate in the site. On Natasha’s website, her fans can watch her working in the studio via webcam, and she often takes recommendations from them about what they want to see. When people are involved in a process, they begin to develop a more personal relationship with the artist. If you don’t want them involved in your art, incorporate a blog and give them a space to get involved in that.

4. Clean and functional layout that highlights your art/work

ChristyHydeck.com

First and foremost, your website is about your work. Viewing art online can be just as visually appealing as viewing it in a gallery. Instead of throwing all your content into a Flickr account and calling it a day, take some time to layout how you want your art to be viewed. Christy Hydeck’s online photo galleries are easy to navigate and beautifully designed.

Pamdora.com

5. Reason for viewer to return to the site

If a viewer knows that you add content to your site on a regular basis, they are more likely to return to the site. Pam Rubert over at Pamdora adds new posts every other week, giving her fans a reason to come back and keep up-to-date on what she is doing.

AmandaPalmer.net

6. Easy ways for your audience to connect/contact you

Give your viewers an easy direct line of contact to you. Amanda Palmer uses social media to connect with her viewers. She connects through Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, Youtube, and Flickr. If your fans have to make an effort to contact you, more often than not, they won’t.