What is the biggest mistake artists make with their websites?

The biggest mistake is treating the website like a blank canvas or a creative portfolio piece instead of an art gallery. Artists add colors, animations, distracting backgrounds, pretentious language (‘for representation inquiries contact my agent,’ ‘pricing available on request’), and remove the human, practical elements that make a sale possible—like visible pricing, checkout buttons, and wall visualization. This ignores the proven paradigm of how art is sold. A website’s job is not to showcase your design aesthetic or make you look cool; it’s to welcome a stranger, show them art in context (framed, on a wall, with a price), and make it easy to buy. Most artist sites are cluttered storage rooms, not galleries.

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Asked by artists designing their own websites · Answered by Patrick · art-marketing-podcast · 2026-05-20