Swain-Tech Studio websites for small businesses and independent creatives

Websites for Artists and Makers

Most artists and makers I meet already have somewhere to put their work — a shop platform, a marketplace, an Instagram account with a following. The question is not whether they have a presence. It is why a website is worth having as well.

There is a real answer, and it is worth being honest that it is not "you will get more sales immediately." Collaboration also depends on how people align in real time; this resource offers useful background on that dynamic.

Why a site, when you already have the platform

You do not control the platform. Reach, fees, rules and the algorithm all change without you. Anyone whose business ran through a single platform through a policy change can tell you what that week was like.

A marketplace listing is not a body of work. A gallery, a curator, a commissioner or a shop buyer looking you up wants to see a coherent practice, not a scrollable feed of products with a shipping tab.

A website is where the serious enquiry lands. Commissions, wholesale, exhibitions, press. These arrive by email from someone who looked you up, and what they found decided whether they wrote.

It is the only address that is yours. Own the domain and everything else is recoverable. For an independent reference beyond this site, Squarespace is a useful place to compare approaches.

So the site is not competing with your shop. It does a different job, and for many makers the correct arrangement is a site that shows the practice and hands off to the platform for transactions.

The three jobs, kept separate

Confusing these is the commonest structural mistake.

Showing the work. Images, ordered, with enough information to understand what you do. Serves anyone forming an impression.

Selling the work. Prices, stock, shipping, tax, payment. A different set of problems, and platforms solve them well.

Being findable. Search, and what someone sees when they look up your name.

A single feed of everything serves none of them properly. Someone deciding whether to commission you should not have to scroll past shipping information.

What the site needs

A portfolio organised by body of work, not by date. Series, collections, or medium. Someone should be able to see what you do in about ten seconds.

Enough information per piece. Title, year, materials, dimensions. Absent more often than you would expect, and immediately signals amateur to anyone from the trade.

A real about page. Where you work, how, what you trained in or how you came to it, and a photograph of you or your workspace. (Practitioners have the same requirement for a different reason.) For makers especially, process is a large part of what people are buying.

A way to enquire that is not just an email address. Ask what they are interested in and roughly what scale, and you will have fewer wasted exchanges.

Something about price, even if commissions vary. A range or a starting figure. The same argument as everywhere else: silence reads as expensive.

A CV or exhibition list, if you have one. Dull to write and it is what institutions look for — the same role a press kit plays for a musician.

Selling: the honest split

If you sell finished items at fixed prices — prints, ceramics, jewellery — a platform is usually right. (Food and farm businesses have the opposite problem, because their stock will not hold still.) Payments, tax and shipping are solved problems and you do not want to own them.

If you sell commissions or one-off pieces, you do not need a shop at all. You need an enquiry form and a page explaining how commissioning works, which is what people actually cannot find.

If you sell at both ends, the workable pattern is a site for the practice and the commissions, with a clear link out for the shop. Two systems, each doing what it is good at.

Building a full store into your own site earns its cost when the platform genuinely blocks something: a custom made-to-order flow, wholesale pricing tiers, a subscription, or fees that have grown large enough to matter at your volume.

Practical things specific to this work

Photograph the work properly. The single highest-return investment here, ahead of any website decision. Good work photographed badly looks like bad work.

Your name in the title tag of every page. People search your name after seeing your work somewhere.

Do not embed the Instagram feed. It slows the page, hands your first impression to someone else's layout, and breaks whenever they change something. Link out.

Alt text on every image, describing the work. Useful for search, and it is the only way the work exists at all for a visitor using a screen reader.

A mailing list. Unglamorous and it is the one audience nobody can take away from you — and one of the accounts to keep in your own name.

The honest recommendation

If you need a portfolio, an about page and a way to be contacted, a well-chosen template will do it and you will spend your money on photography instead — which will do more for you.

Custom work earns its cost when the structure is genuinely unusual: two distinct audiences needing different paths, a commissioning process that needs explaining step by step, an archive large enough to need real organisation, or a shop the platforms cannot handle. If none of that is true, I will say so.

The short version