WordPress for Artists

When I started showing my art on the web I set up a free website at freewebs.com. But after a while I realized that making constant updates to a traditional website is just too much work. And so I looked around for a better solution. It didn’t take long to find out that a blogging system was really what I was looking for. It is designed to be updated frequently and has over the years developed into a tool which is being used by hundreds of millions of people to let others know what’s going on in their personal lives, their companies or where they share their holiday pictures and videos or the latest news on government policies. So why not use it to share my art ?

After I decided to start a blog I pretty soon found out about WordPress, a  blogging software that anyone can use for free. You even have two choices: you can go to wordpress.com where you just have to create a free  account to start blogging right away without having to worry about hosting or coding or web rankings or anything else than the content for your blog. Just choose one of about thirty themes and a few widgets and you are ready to go using the most advanced blogging software available with all it’s benefits but without the hustle of hosting and maintaining it yourself.

Or you go to wordpress.org where you can download the software and then upload it onto your own server. A self-hosted blog gives you the choice of about 700 themes in the themes directory plus tens of thousands of themes on other sites. They range from simple one column old-fashioned blog templates to magazine style and photo blogs to full-fearured video sites for vloggers.  There are also about 3500 plugins available from the plugins directory and many, many more out on the web. Plugins can help you with event calendars, galleries,  shops,  mailing lists and even search engine optimization and web security. New themes and plugins come out every day and can transform your blog into a content management system (cms) that lets you use it as a blog, a  portfolio, a gallery and a shop to show your art, write about it, discuss it with others and sell it. But that’s not all. If you connect it to your social networks like RedBubble, Zazzle, MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter you can make it a very powerful promotion and marketing tool for your own art business. If you are sick of waiting for some gallery or agent to “discover” and “push” you to the realization of your dreams, which I’m sure includes making a living of your art, you might as well try something new and just do it yourself. With a little knowledge about web 2.0 and social networking sites you have more than a chance to start living your dream and earn a living while doing it.

I started my blog about a year ago and I have learned quite a bit along the way and so from now on I will be sharing my experiences with you. This post is the first in my new “Web2.0 for Artists” category. I will be writing about wordpress, social networks for artists and how to use web 2.0 to get your art biz going.

And the first step I recommend is setting up a blog at wordpress. If you have never hosted a site yourself you might wanna start by setting up your blog on wordpress.com. Get your account, start blogging and don’t worry about any tech details. If you want to expand later on you can do so very easily. Get a web host, download the software from wordpress.org  and import your old posts from wordpress.com.

I skipped that part and got myself a host and so next time we will discuss which plugins and themes are best suited for art blogs.

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