Hello All I am an artist that doesn't want to spend lots of time messing about in front of a computer... I'd like a website to sell my work.. I get a headache when I try to read all this technical stuff on these forums... I'm really not bright enough to understand it all!!! Please can anybody let me know the best and cheapest way to get a website that will: 1. Allow me to put a CV of myself as the homepage 2. Present my drawings 3. Provide a purchasing fascility for customers 4. Provide a communication between my customers and myself 5. Give me the maximum capture from search engines from key words Thanks for taking time to read this and I really appreciate it if you've got any ideas on what I can do. Alfie-boy
So is it a shop type site you want to sell your artwork? Then you would send them the artwork by post (I assume it's on canvas or something like that).
Especially with an artsy website like that, the more you invest in the job and designer, the better the outcome... how much are you looking to spend? best of luck with it
A simple Wordpress setup with a WP e-Commerce 3.5.1 . Look for an 'artsy farts' template and then ad a couple of static pages to explain your CV and welcome potential customers. No muss, no fuss and done in an hour or two. Even the teen aged kid down the street could accommodate and it shouldn't run more than they will charge for a couple hours work. The fun starts when you want to get noticed SEO is something you can 'start' to pick up hanging around this BB.
I too would go the same route as Wilsong43. It would be ideal for you and give you a little intro into how to use the internet and design without really getting your finger dirty in the confusing stuff like code. Choose a theme, add some static pages and a few plugins to help you sell your art and off you go. You don't even need Wordpress as your base, there are other content management systems on the internet that are free and would do the job just aswell. Failing all that that a look at this thread http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=524751 - This guy is offering free service to get his portfolio up and running, it might be a way fro you to get something off the ground.
may be the perfect solution for art / pictures to sell and display would be gallery2 as a stand alone - simple setup - may be by a friend. http://gallery.menalto.com/ look at th especial directory for gallery2-sites http://g2-sites.com/ look into the category of stand alone galleries - i.e. without any additional CMS or other stuff. the gallery2 does allow you - a login section for customers - a payment procedure for the shopping cart - to watermark all displayed pics - to have title, short discription and long/full description for each image - to create any number of albums/sub-albums for different categories and much more its all FULLY search engine optimized, including RSS feeds and Google sitemap automatically created as well as search engine friendly links and hotlink protection of all images in addition gallery2 is highly secure, fully maintained Open Source project using PHP and MySQL with lots of fancy additional modules for all needs a publisher might have. for the CV and other additional pages you may add regular hand made HTML pages and link them from EVER gallery page to it. gallery2 has many templates for a huge variety of display and color schemes. it also would allow you to add adsense to make a few hundred extra $ now and then to cover for server expenses. since you dont want to learn the very basics and love to remain a www-slave, you may have to hire someone to do the basic work for installation - you may find knowledgeable admins on the gallery2 forum, may be one of the professional developers may do so for $. unless you decide to move from web slave to web master ans save a few thousand $ a year in exchange for peace of mind ?