Making a Free Artist Website

Having a website gives your visitors a way to follow your work and stay in touch after they leave. There are some great free solutions available for making easy artist websites—and you don't need to be a tech whiz to put together a great site!

We recommend WordPress.com, Tumblr, and artid as the best free or low-cost options for making a portfolio website. WordPress and Tumblr can both be configured to behave as a traditional gallery website or as a blog, and artid offers gallery support. Depending on what type of art you make, you also might find online marketplaces such as Etsy or Square Marketplace or image-oriented social media sites like Pinterest to be useful for their gallery capabilities.

If you try Tumblr, be sure to check out these Best Practices for Artists on Tumblr, including their list of the best Tumblr themes for artists.

If you go the WordPress route, learn.wordpress.com has great tips for WordPress beginners—they also provide a handy list of free art-oriented themes that you can use to personalize the look of your gallery. There are also many different articles available to help you customize, including this guide to making a portfolio site.

These slides from a Spring 2014 presentation for SOS on making an artist website with Tumblr or WordPress contain additional links, theme recommendations and other resources for getting started with your own art website. This video is a version of that talk dealing with making a site using WordPress specifically: