ArtDojo

Many artists are moving online with sketch blogs and art galleries as the process of building a website becomes simpler, but what’s the best option to get online?

With each service I focused on the following:

• Free to use
• Quick to setup
• Easy to maintain
• Features and Expandability

Social Networking Services

I started with the social networking sites Yahoo 360, Myspace, and Windows Live Spaces. All three are free and quick to setup, but Windows Live was the most impressive to me. Setting up a gallery on Windows Live was very easy compared to any other web gallery application I found. To setup the gallery you have to install an Active X control which gives you a unique interface to browse your computer and check the images you want to upload. Live also has a lot of templates to change your space, but it maintains a clean interface in each one.

The same can’t be said for Myspace or Yahoo where users regularly make their page “pretty” with bright colors and background images that make it hard to read the text. This kills usability and is equivilent to commiting online suicide for getting new viewers.

My pick between these three is Windows Live. An artist can have a sketch blog and full gallery up in minutes.

With all three your limited to only what the service can do for you. So expandability is pretty much zero beyond the service given.

Community Galleries

There is actually only one community gallery service worth mentioning here. That would be DeviantArt. Other sites like ConceptArt, CGSociety, etc. are simply forums with a fancy frontpage.

The best is DeviantArt, but being the best donkey still doesn’t make you a horse. With DeviantArt you are limited to only having one gallery with no sub galleries and the journal can hardly be called a blog since it lacks so many features. You must sign up on DeviantArt to make comments. The only real good thing for an artist on DeviantArt is that your work has access to a large community of people that are all art lovers. They also offer a print service for your artwork which might be a good way for a starving artist to make some money. I’ll probably cover revenue sources for artists in a later article.

Expandability is zilch, but DeviantArt is not focused on that. They are strictly focused on building a community of artists and they have succeeded in that.

In any case, I don’t believe DeviantArt or any forum website should be an artists home on the web, since they will be abandoning anyone that does not want to be a part of that community. I think these services should be used to promote your true home on the web. I’ll probably cover that later in an article on promoting your website.

Other Blog Services

For this article I looked at the blogging services Blogger and Wordpress (the solution hosted by WordPress not the downloaded version).

Both cover the first three criteria of being free, quick to setup, and easy to maintain but are drasticly different with features and expandability. Neither has a built-in solution for maintaining a gallery. I’ll cover that later though.

Blogger is almost too simple, but lives up to its name. It’s a blog and not much more. WordPress’s features are covered on their features page. Wordpress probably has the most features of all the free blog services. They are very progressive about improvement, have thorough documentation, and active support forums. There are also a bunch of various plugins that further extend the software, but only a small amount are available for the hosted solution. WordPress is the only covered solution that is based on open source software.

If you ever want your site to be www.yoursite.com, it can be done with either service. Wordpress has a simple process allowing you to buy the domain yourself or through them. You can also move to your own host, download the WordPress software, and port your site over to it. With Blogger the process involves getting a domain, hosting, and setting up blogger to transfer posts to your host. Bloggers solution seems a bit complicated and clunky to me.

Both also have a growing community aspect to them not unlike the social networking services.

One difference for artists is the photo uploading process. Blogger allows you to upload a thumbnail in three different sizes which is linked to a larger picture, but the larger picture will likely be a smaller version of the picture you uploaded. Wordpress gives you the option to have a small thumbnail linked to your larger picture which won’t be resized down. This is good if you want to show high quality images, but bad if you just want to show a sketch since you will have to resize it before uploading. This may be a small tradeoff for the option of showing high quality images. I’m sure the WordPress interface will be improved in future versions (or maybe I will write a plugin for it).

What About A Gallery?

If your just starting your site on Blogger or WordPress, you probably want a small gallery for people to see what you have done. It’s also good for first time viewers to your site so they can see your style and decide if they like it.

The best solution I found was a Google Web Gallery which can be easily maintained with Googles picture managing software Picasa. You can see an example of the web gallery at their test site. Making a web gallery with Picasa is pretty simple after some trial and error (or you could read the help files unlike me) and much easier than using any online gallery system where you have to upload one picture at a time.

With Picasa you can probably have a web gallery up in a few minutes. If you use the downloaded version of WordPress you can install the Picasa Web Matrix plugin to get random pictures from you gallery on your site.

Conclusion

All these solutions are free with the most expandable solution being WordPress with a Picasa web gallery. This combination is a good trade off of all the solutions. Some people might find Blogger easier to start with or Windows Live, DeviantArt, or some other service, but getting online in any way is a good start to promoting your art.

One thing that I neglected to mention is that all these services supply RSS feeds. This is very important as the new version of Internet Explorer 7 has native support for feeds and this technology is becoming more and more mainstream. More non-geeks will be using feeds to keep informed as time goes on. Not having a feed is a big no-no.

I hope some artists find this first article on ArtDojo to be helpful.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 1st, 2006 at 10:06 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.