Website research

I have recently been thinking about what i want my website to be like when i get round to making one. Plenty of times i've visited an artists website only to find its under construction or it's awkward to use.I want my website to be just right. I like it when artists work is catagorised, whether by medium of subject, like Debbie Sampson's: http://www.artsports.com/port/equestrian.php That way work is in some sort of order and you can jump right to the area you're most interested in rather than having to search through a whole gallery and potencially getting bored just before the best bits, this is definately not good when linking art directors or prospective clients to your website.

I like how Tado have made characters specifically for their website: http://www.tado.co.uk/ . Though i've never been on their website, I've been trying for four years but it's always under construction. However, i do like how they don't have a generic looking site, its clear just from the first page what kind of work they do and how brightly coloured everything's going to be. I think i want mine to have one of those initial pages where you have to click somewhere to enter the website with a nice purpose made image to show straight away what feel the website will have.

Female grafitti artist Faunagraphic has a little about herself on her 'about' section but also has a list of clients and other artists she's worked with which is good for finding new artists to research: http://www.faunagraphic.co.uk/wp/about-2

http://www.jonathantruss.com/ This link is to show exacly what i DON'T want my website to look like. Its lumpy and awkward. The plain background is boring and yellow on black is hard to read. Images and type are just put in any-old-how and it generally doesn't look very professional. This one is better: http://www.robertefuller.com/ though it does have a template wiff about it.

Tom Gauld's site doesn't have thumbnails but a list of the works down the side: http://www.tomgauld.com/index.php?/portfolio/ghosts/ If i went down this route i would would like the titles of any images i'd already looked at to be coloured differently or highlighted, that way i know at a glance what i've looked at and what i haven't.


Thumnails are a perfect way fo people to look at your work without having to trawl through a tedious slide show to find the one they saw last time and now want to show to their friends. I like Joe Wilson's thumbnails: http://joe-wilson.com/ Many websites have tiny thumbnails which barely show what the image is like, some try to overcome this by having them pop out when the cursor touches them but this is extremely annoying, i want my thumbnails to keep still. Johan Potmas has the right idea: http://www.johanpotma.com/artwork.html?curPage=1&cHash=7ce1a80aec56c3005824c730377578cf His thumbnails (when clicked) grow to show the true image, but still within the same window. I find it very annoying when i click on an image to see it bigger which then takes me away from the site so i have to keep clicking 'back' to get back to the gallery. These pop outs are much better as you can close that one image and return straight to the site where you left it.