Common Issues: Develop private web site by yourself or use a service from professionals. 1. In the present multinational and multicultural world all art galleries still can be grouped into three branches. On the first place big national and regional or big municipal galleries and museums with many halls, exhibitions and many visitors. On the second place smaller gallery-like retail shops. On the third place we see galleries that exhibit artwork of a very limited number of artists. If we follow numbers here, there are about 36000 different business' in US that associate themselves to art galleries of various types. Only 5-10 % of them own a website. Those who have a website are using it only as an information page or kind of brochure barely giving a small fraction of idea of what their gallery is about, not to say about what items people can see when visiting them. To be precise nearly all these websites have been developed by a friend or a somewhat skillful acquaintance who supports 5 to 20 of other websites, and pay him regularly for support and updates. In some cases a website is developed by a smart child of the gallery owners. Online is beneficial. When you are looking for an artwork to make your walls look beautiful, you will definitely go to some neighboring art gallery. Yet in many cases you will have to be content with something they have, rather then with what you would like to have on your wall. The solution here can be in using some general use art catalog, which exists in print or in the Internet (in rare cases both). For expensive art these figures make the following ratio as of more then 99% are sold through physical galleries to less then 1% through art catalogs and Internet. For not expensive art the ratio is like 80% to 20%, and is steadily changing to favor the later. Expensive art is appearing in online catalogs faster but is sold primarily through physical galleries. This fact should not surprise anyone. At this point one should notice a tendency for the non expensive art to move online to be sold from just being exposed in physical galleries. The rate of none expensive art production is really enormous and already faces the problem of sales. There is no physical gallery that could allow itself exhibit all items it has in stock. Various catalogs could be the solution, and the best way of exposure could be developing and promoting a personal website on the Internet. It's far less expensive then renting several large halls for a few months run in order to allow a limited number of people who live nearby to see it. Rather, one should go online and let literarily everyone on the planet to visit it with no limitation in time. 2. The failure of many galleries has already been vivid due to a lack in either physical or online component. Those who successfully combine both parts are really lucky in their business. 3. What makes galleries go online? a. Local advertising in newspapers, radio, cable-tv, hotels, restaurants becomes more sensible, because people can easily get the idea of a new exhibition and decide which hall or which items they would like to see on the first priority. b. It's easier to keep in touch with visitors. Another side of accumulating constant visitors. c. Online is not limited in space, one can exhibit everything he has not caring for space it occupies. Online is better for not expensive items, while physical exhibition is good for expensive art, when people have to see it live. Or even everything can be exhibited online, and visitors vote to see some items on physical gallery. 4. How galleries go online? a. Some galleries develop their own website and face an issue of promoting it. The tricky point here is they can do it good only for local advertisement, and in order to advertise it worldwide one needs to add way too much effort to promote his own website and/or exhibit it through an already popular website (it helps to avoid double effort on information input). Like it was realized on http://www.gallery-worldwide.com/ and http://www.russian-gww.com/ the point in these 2 sites is that all artwork were uploaded only once, and are shared by both sites. b. In order to sell art worldwide one needs to have a high ranked websites developed by professionals c. Online gallery is an indispensable tool in bringing in new visitors to the physical gallery, so it's part of local advertisement techniques d. The gallery manager will have to make a choice between making a new website from scratch and using a service from already established website produced and supported by the internet gurus e. In case on takes his own way he must consider both the development and support of his own site f. Development as a matter of fact costs 500-5000$. Buying a service is a lot cheaper. In case of same price service quality is better. g. Supporting a website in average takes about 200$ per month and up to 500$ depending on a skill of a webmaster. Also in this case webmaster is limited by his own activities and sometimes supports upto 20 different websites at the same time. The later makes him very difficult to add changes to the website fast and sometimes would take about few weeks to complete necessary updates. Buying a service galleries pay less and get immediate changes. h. It's always a matter of price and quality. Development of the website is only the first step. Support takes much longer time and larger effort. Service price varies at the value 300$ per month. If you find it for 150$ then grab and run. Internet technologies are developing too fast today. There is a number of sites providing the described services at different levels of quality. So one has to investigate the market and find the best fitting solution for himself. Waste money to develop a wheel or learn it from someone who already did it? |
