The Artist Website
The first thing was to distill down the basic website. One of the issues I have with some of the full WordPress themes is that many artists do not have enough content to fill out all the text areas on all the pages. This often results in pages that are very short and look odd. Initially I was thinking of setting the theme as a single landing page, multi-section site. But on reflection, not having navigation would limit the theme development and customisation too much. Then I started asking artists what they wanted and what they did not want. Most notably, I was asking my partner how she wanted me to redesign her site that was initially built using the Elementor Pro page builder.
The styling and visuals were fine, but she did not want a blog or complex multi content site that was setup originally. We set about reducing pages and sections. Most of the content was to go onto the landing page. A separate page was used for Exhibition listings. All key content could be just added into the main areas via the WordPress page Title and Content fields, making it easy for the artist to change and edit. Additional text and images required for the page templates were just added as WordPress custom fields. Again, easy for any artist with limited IT skills to be able to update.
Whilst her site originally had many galleries, now all she wanted was one gallery on the landing page. A kind of less is more approach. My partner is not someone who wants to be constantly updating her website, but she does use Instagram often to update her content. Now her website landing page is much more concise. A header image, bit of text about her work, a small gallery of recent work, funnelling quickly down to a call to action Follow Me on Instagram button. That way she hopes to capture additional followers on her more dynamic Instagram account. The only content she will need to add to her website on a regular basis is the listings on her Exhibitions page.
This content would serve as the base structure for the theme. Very much geared to a simple portfolio website, rather than one that is planned to be used for constant content updates. Care was taken to make the simple site clean and elegantly responsive. As all the code is in the bespoke theme it is also relatively simple to change the look and feel of the styling so that any other artists using the same base theme do not end up with websites that look the same. Having built the theme from scratch using php, css and javascript, it is easy for me to change and develop elements as and when required.
