Ownership
Your own site can point to whatever matters: images, writing, shows, shops, archives, press, collaborators, and contact details. It is a home base you can move, revise, or rebuild over time.
Web resources
Start your art site
Considering building your own artist site for the first time? Coming back to the idea after having a site in the past? Here is some beginner-friendly guidance for domains, hosting, portfolios website basics, and maintaining an independent online presence. These are just best practices learned from personal experiences shared by queer artists.
An artist website gives people a reliable place to find your work, contact you, and understand your creative practice without depending only on a feed, marketplace, or company account. It can be small and imperfect, but still useful. A website communicates trust.
Permanence
Social accounts change, vanish, get locked, or become harder to search. A personalized art website gives curators, friends, collectors, writers, and collaborators a steadier path back to you.
Discoverability
A clear page with your name, region, work, and preferred contact method helps search engines and human directories understand where to send people. It does not need to be fancy to be findable.
Start here
Why Build an Artist Website?
A practical introduction to why artist-owned websites matter, especially when queer work needs context, continuity, and a place to exist beyond changing platforms.
Simple site contents
What to Include on a Simple Artist Website
A practical guide to the minimum useful pieces of an independent artist website: public name, short introduction, selected images, contact method, and optional additions that can come later.
Publishing pathways
Low-Tech Ways to Publish Online
A reassuring guide to beginning with one page, a template, a linked document, a writing system, or a shared publishing project without treating technical complexity as the goal.
Long-term care
Maintaining a Website Over Time
A calm guide to slow updates, small maintenance habits, redesigns, incomplete archives, and letting artist websites evolve across years.
Privacy and boundaries
Privacy and Safety Basics
A calm guide to public identity, domain privacy, contact boundaries, sensitive work, backups, and choosing a level of visibility that feels sustainable.
Preservation and backups
Preserving and Backing Up Your Work
A calm guide to keeping original files, saving context, backing up websites and publications, exporting from platforms, and building an archive slowly over time.
First step
Make One Small Page
Open a blank document and write your public name, two sentences about your work, a contact email, and a list of five pieces you would show someone first. That draft is already the beginning of your site.