Bytesmiths Gallery Infrastructure

Thanks to a number of my web development customers, I have developed a re-usable infrastructure for building artst's websites.

What does this mean in english?

• I can have your site up quickly, often within a week,
• It can be much cheaper than a custom-designed site,
• I'm constantly improving it, at no additional cost to you,
• You can easily maintain the site, uploading your own images and descriptions, saving you money and time.

Your Gallery site will have these features:

• a randomly selected piece of your art on the front page, holding the interest of those who visit multiple times,
• a thumbnail visual index of your art -- you control the number of rows and columns and the sorting of the thumbnail images
• each thumbnail is linked to a large image that includes additional information that you control
• a wide variety of data you can use for organizing your site, such as Title, Description, Notes, Category, Price, etc. You can choose to hide certain objects, and can cause them to show up with "new" icon. You can choose whether to display any of this information with your home page image, with thumbnails, or with the large detail image. You can also choose to show any of this information in popup text when a viewer pauses their cursor over an image.
• searching of your data fields, as you choose to allow
• sorting the thumbnail gallery by any information you choose
• form-based email so people can contact you without exposing your email address to the address-harvesting software used by spammers
• a password-protected administration page where you control the presentation of your site
• artist's authoring of arbitrary web pages via MediaWiki, the software used by WikiPedia, a user-written, on-line encyclopedia
• on-line ordering via PayPal

You can look at a demo site for a typical example. Contact me for a password to try out the artist's admin interface, where you have complete control over your image and information display.

Here are some actual artists' sites that I've built using this system:

• Champagne Beadworks
• Gemini Gypsy
• Mary Kollman
• Ratso's Studio
• Veggie Mog
• Whitehorse Designs
  
  
• demo site -- contact me for the admin password to see how to add images and change look and feel.

Future plans include:

• an event schedule that you maintain, so you can keep your fans appraised of your exibitions,
• multiple price-points per image, for artists who sell reproductions in different sizes,
• public participation via reviewed and approved commentary on your work,
• a weblog ("blog") that you can use as a public journal or newsletter,
• a sign-in form, where your fans can give you their complete contact information, maintained in a database that you can search and sort
an e-postcard feature, which your fans can use to send your art to their friends via email
• a links page, where you can list links to other websites

Go to my prices page for details, then call or email, and we'll get your new website "on the air!"