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Artist Website – Portfolio with Galleries

Written by: Katie Ayres

June 25, 2020

This is a demonstration of a website for an artist, Agnes Jorgensen developed by Katie Ayres. It includes a categorized gallery, commission information and testimonials.

This website includes a extensive home page with:

In addition, it has the following pages:

Mentioned in video: Renee Phillips, curator of Manhattan Arts International

Script

Today I am going to demonstrate an online portfolio that is organized into galleries.  The portfolio is part of a website that I designed and developed for Agnes Jorgensen, an artist who paints beautiful award-winning paintings. 

Hello! My name is Katie Ayres, and I’m a web developer and owner of 1 Happy Place, and today I am going to demonstrate an extensive artist website that includes a portfolio with galleries.

Home Page

We will start with her homepage, which features her beautiful piece, Prima Dancer.  The styling of the website was inspired by that painting.  The light background color with the maroon lettering and sapphire backgrounds pull together a look that is both powerful and delicate, just like Agnes’ work.

Her home page starts with a lovely quote from Agnes.  Part of my job is to take the information that the client wants to convey and find ways to display it that supports and further communicates its meaning.  Placing this quote in a deep sapphire just under her painting brings it to focus and allows the visitor to better understand her as an artist.

Below that is her artist statement and a nice picture of her in her studio.  This is followed by a quote from Renee Phillips, the curator of Manhattan Arts International, which beautifully explains Agnes as an artist and the qualities of her work.

Next we have a slide show of paintings that Agnes can curate anytime she wishes through my hosting service.  This is followed by a contact form embedded on the front page.

I love the painting that is used for the footer.  It grounds the website, and pulls you into her fantastic work.

Portfolio Gallery

Now we move to her portfolio which is organized into galleries.  Each gallery has a name and a selected painting as the cover.  As part of her hosting with me, she can change this list of galleries anytime, as well as any of the cover paintings. 

Each gallery can be clicked to move to that collection of paintings. Let’s go to the Figurative gallery.

Each piece has detailed information.  For Agnes’work, it includes the title, price, size and any information about the framing.  In addition, I used an icon to distinguish paintings that have won awards.

If a visitor clicks on one of the paintings, it zooms to fill the screen, and from there, they can click to move through the rest of the paintings.

There is also a breadcrumb menu along the top that allows the visitor to move easily through the galleries and explore her work.  Let’s use the breadcrumb menu to move to the Travel gallery. 

A painting can be part of more than one gallery. For example, let’s look at the colorful painting, Bring in the Referees. Since it contains prominent zebras, this is both in the Travel gallery and the Animal gallery.

Organizing the portfolio into galleries allows the visitor to easily find the paintings that interest them.  

Resume and About

Let’s move next to the resume and about page, which provides detailed information about Agnes’ career.

The Resume page lists all of her exhibitions, the publications in which her work was highlighted, and her memberships. 

Because of the use of bullets and the large amount of information, this was a nice opportunity to display the information in two columns.  One of the difficulties of a website is that you can’t display a paragraph that is too wide.  When reading to the end of the line, the eye struggles to find the next line, and this slows down the reader. 

This is why books are sized the way they are, to allow for one column per page that is sized appropriately for the eye’s ability and promotes smooth reading.  But in this case, we have clear listings on narrow columns that are easy for the eye to scan. Back on her About page, you can see that I used columns here as well, since a visitor would only read one of the two columns, the French or the English.

Testimonials

Agnes has very happy clients who have written descriptive testimonials. We decided to dedicate a page to these endorsements, and show the entire text along with the painting the client had purchased or commissioned.  This helps the website visitor understand what it is like to work with Agnes, furthering their insight into her as an artist.

Contact page

On the contact page, we were able to bring much more interest to a standard contact page, by using this bright and colorful painting about a pleasant conversation to set the tone.

Exhibition 

Agnes and her husband, Andre Chatelain, created a collection of thirteen oil paintings for a museum.  On the website, these pages create an online version of that museum collection.  First, here we have an introduction to the exhibit, and then the visitor can click on any of the paintings to see both the piece and the accompanying text that was posted on the museum walls. They can click on any painting to look at it and read the text, replicating how they might walk through the museum.

Commission 

The commission page discusses all the information you need to commission a painting from Agnes.  This includes the categories of the commissions she paints, examples of each one, and a sample gallery of some of her commissions from the past.  In addition, there is an embedded contact form, to allow for easy communication with her if you would like to start the commission process.

It was a joy to create Agnes’ website to help communicate to the world her beautiful work.

Hey thanks for watching!  Be sure to subscribe to my channel to learn more about my work developing websites for artists.

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