Website Checklist for Artists and Makers Selling Online

People buy art and handmade things with their eyes first. Your website has one main job: to show your work as well as it looks in real life, then make buying it simple.

Here's the checklist we use when building sites for artists and makers.

Your photos

• [ ] Shot in good natural light, against a plain background, with the colours true to life.
• [ ] More than one view of each piece: the whole thing, a close-up of the texture or detail, and one showing its size (on a wall, in a hand, being worn).
• [ ] Shown whole. Don't crop the edges of a painting or the head off a model wearing your work.
• [ ] Resized for the web. Huge photo files make your site slow, especially on phones. They can be made much smaller without looking any different.

Your product pages

• [ ] The price, clearly. Hiding the price makes people leave.
• [ ] Size, materials and care instructions.
• [ ] A sentence or two of story. Where the idea came from, how it was made. This is what makes handmade worth more than mass-made.
• [ ] What happens when it's sold. Mark one-off pieces as sold rather than deleting them. Sold work shows people your work is wanted.

Buying and paying

• [ ] Card payments that just work, through a trusted provider like Stripe or Square.
• [ ] Shipping costs shown before checkout, not as a surprise at the end.
• [ ] A simple returns and commissions policy.
• [ ] A thank-you email after every order, so buyers know it went through.

Being found

• [ ] Your name and what you make in the page title, such as "Barbara Pritchard, textile artist".
• [ ] A short, real "About" page with a photo of you or your studio.
• [ ] An email signup, so people who aren't ready to buy today can hear about your next collection.
• [ ] Links to and from your Instagram or Facebook.

Looking after it

• [ ] New work goes up quickly, without waiting weeks.
• [ ] The site is fast on a phone. Most people will first see your work on their phone.
• [ ] Someone checks it works, including a test purchase now and then.

If you'd like a second opinion on your current site, book a free chat and we'll go through this list with you.