Sell Your Art Online With Your Own Unique Website

If you are serious about selling your art online, then you should be serious about developing your own website. I am not referring to those free website builders your Internet Service Provider gives you or any other free website providers. I am talking about a professional website with your own unique domain name: www.yourname.com.

There are good reasons why you should never use a free design service. The company that provides the free service owns your website space and they can do whatever they wish with your site, namely advertise on it.

There is nothing more unprofessional than unrelated banner advertising and popup windows that are usually associated with free websites. Not only are they annoying, but they also distract visitors from your art.

There is also the risk that your website provider may go out of business. That free site you spent all that time promoting is gone and your efforts were in vain.

With your own unique domain name, the worst-case scenario is you have to change hosting accounts. Your domain name remains unchanged and your customers can still reach your site.

Having your own website with a unique domain name tells your potential customers that you are a professional and serious about your business. It also looks wonderful on business cards!

Can you imagine handing out business cards at art shows or to other interested people with this printed on your cards: http://www.somefreewebsite.com/artists/yourgallery/index.html. This is unprofessional and it's difficult for your customers to remember.

Having your own unique website offers convenience for you and potential customers. For instance, lets say you are traveling to another state, or another part of the world for that matter. You meet someone who is interested in seeing your work, but you don't have your portfolio with you. You may have just lost a potential customer. If you have a nice business card, with your website address printed on it, the potential customer can simply visit your website at his or her convenience to view your work, and it doesn't matter if they live around the corner or on the other side of the world! Your website is available 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

Now that you see the benefits of having your own website, you will need to take the first step, and that is to register your domain name (www.yourname.com).

Registering your own domain name is easy and extremely affordable today. My recommendation is to register through a site called Godaddy.com. They are amongst the lowest priced domain registration services online at around $9 for the entire year (this was the price at the time of writing this article).

Once you register your domain name, its time to begin your website design. You can either hire a web designer or do it yourself. Whichever method you choose here are some general guidelines:

My advice is to keep your site clean and simple. Do not load your site with lots of fancy graphics or long multimedia presentations. These only annoy and distract visitors away from your art and increase the amount of time it takes for pages to download.

Make your site navigation is easy to follow and consistent throughout your entire site.

Make it easy for your visitors to contact you. Put a "contact" or "contact us" link on every page in clear view.

Avoid animated graphics, moving text, or other animated features on your website.

Make all of the links on your site standard colors and underlined. Blue is for unvisited links, purple for visited.

Resources for do it yourself web design - There are many places online where you can learn HTML and web design completely free. One of my favorite sites is W3 Schools - http://www.w3schools.com/. W3 Schools is a wonderful site packed with lots of great information on HTML and web design. The tutorials are informative and very easy to follow.

If you are not the type who enjoys learning online, there are also a handful of great books you can purchase. "Learning Web Design" by Jennifer Niederst is a book that gives you a good all around introduction to web design. There are other great books. Just head over to a site like Amazon and a do a search for "beginner web design". Find books that have good feedback ratings from customers. Read through the feedback to make sure the book is the right fit for your experience level.

I hope this article has got you excited about getting your own website. If you have any questions about anything covered in this article, do not hesitate to contact me. Please send your question to: ralph@sellingartnews.com.

Be sure and head over to http://www.sellingartnews.com, for more great articles and tips on selling your art.

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About Ralph Serpe

Ralph Serpe is Webmaster and founder of http://www.sellingartnews.com. Sell Your Art News provides resources and information to help artist's start a successful career selling their art or crafts.


And here is another random article you might be interested in...

Bread, Milk & Car Insurance

With increased competition between supermarkets to gain market share and improve profitability, the range of products on offer is getting ever diverse. Now, the big three chains, Tesco, Sainsbury's and Asda have caught on to the fact that their brand name can sell just about anything, including of all things, car insurance.

Car insurance is one of those very boring expensive products that you loathe having to pay for but have no choice if you want to drive a car on Britain's roads. Why therefore would supermarkets want to be associated with such a seemingly expensive pain in the pocket? Well it seems that the public think it's a great idea and are buying it from these stores in their thousands with the belief that it must cheap if the supermarkets are selling it. The strange thing is that the companies behind these deals, who are actually underwriting the risk, are the same companies who have been selling you car insurance for years.

Tesco for example seem to be incredibly successful in selling motor insurance to their customers with statements proclaiming that you could save up to £150 compared to some leading insurers. Tesco of course is not an insurer. If you look closely at the bottom of the Tesco car insurance webpage, you will notice it says that the policy is provided and underwritten by a company called UK Insurance Limited. Who on earth is this company you may ask. UK Insurance Limited is part of Royal Bank of Scotland who also own Direct Line along with Churchill and Privilege.

Sainsbury's state that you could save up to £165 on your car insurance compared to other leading insurers - £15 better than Tesco. Of course, like Tesco, Sainsbury's is not an insurer either. A quick look at their webpage shows that policies are arranged and administered by Esure, who are part of the Halifax Bank of Scotland group. Maybe Sainsbury's are about to swap Jamie Oliver for Michael Winner â€" maybe not.

Asda state that they give you the "very best possible insurance protection" and offer a 10% discount if you buy online. Of course, just like Tesco and Sainsbury's, Asda is not an insurer. Asda have opted to team up with Norwich Union to provide their policies.

The insurers are desperate to get into bed with the Supermarkets. It enables them to dress up their car insurance product with an already well known and trusted brand name. This is good business and a smart way to gain lots of new customers very quickly. Ironically though, some of those 'new' customers may already be with that insurer. Without knowing it, they may end up cancelling or not renewing their existing policy but staying with the same insurance company via the cheaper supermarket option.

>From a customer perspective, the upshot of all this will hopefully be to get cheaper car insurance, which at the end of the day is what everybody wants. Who the insurer is behind the deal is probably not of great concern to people. In the long term, whether the actual underwriting results of these deals are profitable enough for the insurers to continue to offer the supermarkets good rates for their customers, will be interesting. One thing is for sure, I don't see Direct Line advertising bananas six for a pound anytime soon.

Copyright (c) 2004 AcceptDirect.co.uk http://www.acceptdirect.co.uk

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About Andrew Bowen

Andrew Bowen is the CEO of Accept Direct Limited. Accept Direct offer car insurance to UK customers through their website http://www.acceptdirect.co.uk