The Artist Website Checklist: 20 Checks Before a Collector Visits

In short

A professional artist website has four jobs: present the work at full quality, explain what each work is, make availability and the next step clear, and stay readable to people and search systems.

This artist website checklist turns those four jobs into 20 specific checks. Run them on your own website in under an hour, then fix the gaps in the order they cost you the most.

Run the checklist before you redesign anything

Most artist websites do not fail because they look wrong. They fail because the work cannot be examined.

A website can introduce an artist well and still stop exactly where a serious visitor starts asking questions. What is this piece? How large is it? What is the surface like? Is it still available?

Interest usually begins with a single work, often on another platform. Everything after that moment happens on your own website or does not happen at all. Check the site as a first-time visitor would, one artwork at a time.

Can the work actually be seen?

Presentation is the first failure point. A viewer who cannot examine a work cannot decide about it.

1. Detail is reachable. On a large work, a viewer can reach brushwork, grain, print texture or fine digital detail.
2. Nothing is cropped. The full composition is visible in the first view, including on a phone.
3. The file is the right source. Export from the master file in sRGB, with the longest edge large enough to support a close view.
4. Colour is consistent. The same work looks the same on its own page, in its series and in any preview.
5. Time-based work plays properly. Video and motion pieces use a real player, not a short compressed loop.

Never re-upload a file that a social platform has already compressed. Each pass removes detail permanently.

Does every work have its own page?

A collector decides about a specific piece, not about a gallery grid.

1. One artwork, one page, one address. A work that exists only inside a slider cannot be linked, shared or cited.
2. The core record is present: title, year, medium, materials, dimensions, edition or uniqueness.
3. The work sits in its series, with a link to the rest of that body of work.
4. A short text explains the work. Two or three sentences about intent, process or material.
5. Provenance details are accurate and complete: exhibited, published, signed, certificate, printer.

Empty fields are read as answers. A missing dimension suggests the work has not been documented, whether or not that is true. Writing these pages well is a subject of its own, covered in the artwork pages article.

Is the next step obvious?

Interest expires quickly. Someone who wants to ask about a work should not have to look for a way to do it.

1. Availability is stated: available, reserved, sold or in a private collection. Silence reads as unavailable.
2. The next step sits on the artwork page itself, not only on a contact page three clicks away.
3. Inquiries reach you directly, in a channel you control, with the work they refer to attached.
4. Terms are stated once and plainly: shipping, framing, print options, digital delivery, commissions.

Selling directly is not the only valid goal. An artist who works through galleries still benefits when a curator can read availability instead of writing to ask.

Can people and search systems find the work?

Search engines and AI systems cannot interpret an artistic practice from images alone.

1. The pages are public and crawlable, and each page exists as a real page rather than a state inside one long scroll.
2. Each page has its own title and one clear main heading. Gallery and Works describe nothing.
3. Images carry concise alternative text that identifies what is visible.

One practical test: search your own name in a private browser window. If platforms appear and your own website does not, that is a structural problem rather than a content problem.

Does the site explain the practice?

Context is what turns one artwork into an artist worth following.

1. Your professional name is identical across the website, profiles, exhibition listings and press. Name variants split the evidence that connects you to your own work.
2. There is a real biography and a current CV: what you make, where it has been shown, education, publications and residencies, in plain dated form.
3. The website is current. A site whose last addition was two years ago raises a question you would rather not invite.

A rhythm you can keep matters more than volume. One work or series documented properly each month is enough.

Score the site and choose one starting point

Count the checks you pass. Where the gaps sit matters more than the total.

Presentation gaps cost you interest. Information and availability gaps cost you conversations. Discoverability gaps cost you visitors you never see, which makes them the hardest to notice on your own.

If you fix one thing, fix the artwork page. It is where presentation, information, availability and search visibility meet. Ten properly built artwork pages do more than a hundred images in a grid.

Repeat the checklist after every redesign

Run it twice a year, and again whenever the template changes.

Presentation quality and page structure are what most often break quietly during a redesign. Images get resized, individual pages become sections, and availability disappears from the layout.

Digital Original builds this structure into the product: full-quality images with Deep Zoom, artwork pages with the fields collectors read, availability and direct purchase, search-ready pages, analytics and your own domain.