Your work deserves to be found, not just loved by friends
Website design for artists
I build websites for artists who are selling work. Through a shop, through commissions, through galleries and exhibitions, or all three at once.
I build websites for artists who are selling work. Through a shop, through commissions, through galleries and exhibitions, or all three at once.
My website are built around your images rather than squeezed into a template, and it is built so that your name comes up when people search for you and for what you make.
I have spent eight years building websites and more than twenty in marketing before that. I audit a lot of artist sites.
Most of them look lovely and are close to invisible in search, and that is almost never the artist’s fault.
I also build websites for Art Galleries.
Who is my idea client?
You are established. Your work sells. You are not starting out.
Most artists come to me in one of two situations.
The first: your website site was built a few years ago, it looked right at the time, and now the enquiries have thinned out. You cannot see why. Nothing has obviously broken.
The second: the website does its job as a portfolio, but you want to sell directly now. Prints, smaller pieces, a collection, the work that does not need a gallery sitting between you and the buyer.
WILDCURRANT
What it costs
Bespoke website design starts at £4,800 for a site of up to six pages, with full search optimisation and the groundwork so that AI search tools can read and recommend you.
Six pages covers most artists: home, about, a gallery, contact, and two more for whatever your work needs, whether that is your process, your exhibitions or a blog.
Beyond that, additional pages are around £300 each.
Additional galleries are £300 to £500, depending on how many pieces are in them. That range exists because the work sits in the images rather than the page. Every piece has to be resized, compressed, renamed for what someone would actually search, and given alt text. A gallery of twenty and a gallery of two hundred are not the same job, and the second is where a lot of the value sits. Larger collections are quoted individually.
Adding a shop is a further £800. If you want to sell directly from the site, that is the version you want, and I would rather say so now than on the call.
If you sell only through exhibitions and enquiries and do not want a shop at all, you still want the same build. The shop is the easy part. What you are paying for is being findable.
Every site includes the website management plan at £65 a month. Hosting, updates, backups, security monitoring and fifteen minutes of small content changes each month. It is not optional. A site nobody maintains is a site that breaks, usually quietly, usually a few months after everyone stopped looking.
WILDCURRANT
Pay in installments
Nobody pays in one go. The cost is split into four:
25% to book. A non-refundable deposit that holds your start date.
25% on the day we start.
25% at your first review, when there is a site to look at.
25% before your site goes live.
On a £4,800 build, that is £1,200 at a time. Depending on how far ahead you book, there can be a few months between the first payment and the second. Nothing is owed after launch except the £65 monthly management plan.
WILDCURRANT
What’s the process?
We agree a start date, and I hold it. I only ever work with one client at a time so you get my undivided attention.
From that start date, your site goes live within six to ten weeks. There are two rounds of review built in, so you see the work, tell me what to change, and see it again. You are not waiting until the end and hoping.
What I need from you is images of your work ready to go, a clear sense of what you want someone to do when they land on the site, an hour of you time at the start, a couple of hours of gentle ‘homework’ collating what you need to send me and half an hour or so each review round to look properly and come back to me.
I will guide you every step of the way.
I have worked with Melissa since 2020. She has transformed my online presence..
This lady has the patience and skills that managed to decipher my ramblings into a coherent and beautiful website!
Recent work
Jeremy Moulsdale
contemporary sculptor
A portfolio site with no shop. Jeremy sells through exhibitions and enquiries, so the site had one job: put the sculpture in front of you at full size, then get you to the contact page.
View the website HERE
Deborah Timperley
GLASS ARTIST
Museum collected, Crafts Council selected, showing at Collect 2026.
Deborah sells her sculpture and bowls directly, so this is a full WooCommerce shop with collections, an exhibitions page and an FAQ built to answer the questions buyers ask before they commit.
View the website HERE
Yasemen Hussein
SCULPTOR
Commissions for the V&A, the Four Seasons Tokyo and Clarges Mayfair, alongside a shop selling jewellery and smaller pieces.
Two very different buyers on one site, and the structure keeps the commission enquiries and the shop out of each other’s way.
View the website HERE
Book a discovery call
Twenty minutes, no pitch. Tell me what you make and what the site needs to do. If it is not a fit I will say so on the call rather than send you a proposal.
I’m so pleased I chose Melissa to create my new website. Not only am I delighted with the result, but it was a pleasure to work with her. I was very nervous about the whole process, but she guided me through it from start to finish, with clarity, insight and expertise. I would absolutely recommend her if you’re thinking about a new website..
– JEREMY MOULSDALE
Questions artists ask me
Fifteen things I would fix on most artist websites
If you are not ready to work with me yet, here is most of what I would tell you on a call.
1. Know who you are designing for. Art buyers, collectors, gallery curators and fellow artists all want different things from the same page. Look at which platform actually sends you visitors and who is following you there, then design for those people rather than for a general audience that does not exist.
2. Keep the navigation obvious. Clear categories, sensible labels, nothing clever. If someone has to think about where to click, you have lost them.
3. Give each medium its own page. Every page can only be optimised for one search term. If you paint and you print and you sculpt, that is three pages. Put all three on one and Google cannot tell what any of it is about.
4. Write an artist statement in the first person. It is an invitation into your working life: what drives the work, where it comes from, why you make what you make. Your bio is the third-person one. They are different documents and both have a place.
5. Make the About page do some work. People buy art from people. Your vision, your process, what you have achieved, written honestly. This is the page that turns someone who liked an image into someone who remembers your name.
6. Pay for proper photography. Bad photographs of good work look like bad work. This is the most common place I see artists undermine themselves.
7. Then compress those photographs. Large uncompressed images make a site slow, and a slow site loses both visitors and rankings. Every image needs resizing and compressing before it goes near the page.
8. Rename your image files. Google cannot see a picture. It reads the file name and the alt text. Unless you painted the Mona Lisa, the title of the piece is not what people are typing into a search box.
9. Show less than you have. A portfolio is a highlight reel. Curate to the work that represents where you are now and how good you are, and leave the rest out.
10. Scatter your testimonials. Do not build a page called Testimonials that nobody visits. Put the strongest lines on the pages where someone is deciding, and cut them down to the part that matters.
11. Make contact easy. An email address, a short form, and a phone number if you are comfortable with that. If you sell from the site you need a postal address too, and the footer is the right place for it.
12. Put social icons in the footer only. You have worked hard to get someone onto your site. Do not hand them a one-click exit back to Instagram from your header.
13. Check it on a phone. I audit sites for artists who are genuinely surprised by how much of their traffic is mobile. It is usually most of it.
14. Keep it current. New work added regularly tells both visitors and Google that you are active. Broken links and a 2022 exhibitions page tell them the opposite.
15. Get the meta descriptions right. The two lines under your name in search results are the advert for your page, and most artists leave them to be generated automatically.
Free guide: why your website has gone quiet
The enquiries that used to come in have slowed, and you cannot quite put your finger on why.
My free guide gives you five signs your website has gone quiet, a five-point SEO check you can run yourself with no tools, and one simple way to see whether ChatGPT and Google’s AI recommend you.
After that I send short weekly website and SEO tips. Unsubscribe whenever you like.
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Chat about your needs?
Tell me what you make and what the site needs to do.
Twenty minutes, and you will leave the call knowing what I would do and what it would cost, whether or not you go ahead.