Creating a photography site to sell fine art prints focusing on what the customer wants
Selling fine art prints is a tough business now. Once upon a time, selling art prints on the internet was pretty easy. Then competition swooped in and art prints became a commodity.
As a result, practicing good online sales techniques are more important than ever. That means developing a more customer focused experience than before – presenting your work in a way that makes the visitor’s experience quicker and easier.
Photo website hosts like artstorefronts.com are changing the landscape of what is possible with photo sites. Now SmugMug has always been my photo website host of choice, so this is an attempt to marry these new with what SmugMug offers. While some features just don’t exist for SmugMug users, like the ability to see your image in a frame on a wall, or the simpler shopping cart, others can be integrated into SmugMug’s framework.
One of the secrets of photo websites is that if you’re getting organic search traffic from Google, most of your visitors don’t land on your homepage. So it’s essential that if they find your work interesting, they can quickly and easily get to the content they’ll like, and from any page on the site.
The ability to add images to collections means that an image doesn’t have to reside in a single gallery. So visitors can choose to view your images based on their criteria, such as the theme of their rooms, or even by dominant colors.
The more you know about your target audience, the better you’re able to organize your work into galleries that appeal to them. In this case it’s easier as this is my own work, and I’ve got years of information from past sales and Google analytics to guide me.
In addition, Wytchery Art features the work of UK artist Cate Davies, whose style complements my own. The result is we’re able to flesh out galleries that would have been sparse if I had to rely on my images alone.
The end result is more of a store front feel perhaps than the typical artist’s portfolio site. Time will tell whether this will translate to more sales, but the early results are promising.
Check out the site itself at www.wytcheryart.com.
