An art gallery’s website that is itself a gallery
A gallery’s website has three jobs: to show what’s on, to say which artists the gallery works with, and to get a collector to ask about a work or come in. A grid of thumbnails does all three at the size of a postage stamp.
Studio does them the way the gallery itself does. The current show hangs in a room — three to eight works, one after another, each with its wall label: the artist, the title, the medium, the year. Visitors walk the room by scrolling, in the order you hung it.
After the room: your services, the people at the gallery, the artists you represent, and an enquiry form, with a “Book a call” button beside it if you use a booking page for viewings.
What your site shows
The gallery’s name
Your name opens the page, with one sentence on what you show and where. The opening hours and the address can go in the line under the contact heading, at the end of the page.
The current show
Three to eight works hang in the order you choose — paintings, photographs, works on paper, or an installation view for work that doesn’t hang on a wall.
Wall labels
Each label puts the artist where the demo puts the client, beside the medium and the year, with the title above and a line below — a sentence from the exhibition text, or where the work comes from.
Services, team, artists
Your services — exhibitions, advisory, framing, editions — come next, one word apiece with a sentence of explanation; then the gallery’s team, and the artists you represent, set out as names under the heading “Artists” or any other.
Enquiries and viewings
A collector names the work they’re interested in and ticks a band that can follow the prices of the show, so no price list has to appear on the page; “Book a call” opens your booking page to arrange a viewing.
Have this ready
- Photographs of three to eight works from the current show, or installation views.
- For each: the title, the artist (up to 40 characters), the medium and size, the year and one line.
- The artists you represent, one name per line, and the heading for that list.
- Two to six services — Exhibitions, Advisory, Framing, Editions — with a sentence each.
- Opening hours and address in a line, plus the gallery’s team and their roles.
- Price bands for enquiries, a Web3Forms key, and a booking link for viewings.
Worth knowing
Rehang with every show
The room holds one exhibition. When the next one opens, swap the works in the wizard and deploy the new download: the old show comes off the walls, as it does in the gallery.
Clear the pictures with the artists
Agree with each artist, in writing, that the works may be shown on the gallery’s site, and credit whoever photographed them — the line under each work has room for “Photo: …”.
Choose the works that carry the show
With eight frames at most, the room is a digest of the exhibition rather than its catalogue. Hang the works that make its argument, and link the full list or the catalogue from the footer.
Date the show on the page
The line after the last work is yours to write: use it for the exhibition’s title and dates, so nobody plans a visit to a show that has already closed.
Questions
- Can we keep an archive of past exhibitions?
- Not in the kit: the room shows one hang at a time, with no pages behind the frames. An archive kept elsewhere — on your previous site, in a PDF, on Instagram — can be linked from the footer.
- Can each artist have a page of their own?
- No. The artists appear as names in the list you write, without links or pages. Their websites can’t be linked from that list; the footer takes up to six links in all.
- Can collectors buy a work online?
- There’s no checkout. A collector picks a price band and writes; you answer with the price, the availability and the paperwork, and a viewing can be arranged from there.
- Does the page show our opening hours and a map?
- The hours and the address go in as text — the address also gives the page its city —, but there’s no embedded map. A link to the gallery on Google Maps can sit in the footer.
- Can the labels show prices?
- Only in the line under each work, since the label has no price field of its own. If you’d rather give prices on request, leave them out and let the price bands in the form do that work.