A Website Construction Guide for Visual Artists:

It's Built, It's Published...
Now What?

Getting onto search engines

Generally, search engines will return information on sites that they already know about. They become acquainted with websites by sending out "spiders" that travel along links, fetch pages (and text content) and feed them into the seach engine. This can take time, given the enormity of the Web. So you can register your site at DMOZ, a directory that services a number of well-known search engines (including Google). But don't expect lightning-fast results.

Really, the best way to get your site on the first page of anyone's Googlesearch is to get your site links from someone who already has lots of traffic.

Here's an article on search engine submission tips.

Self-promotion

Once your site is up, it is then very easy to introduce yourself to gallerists, curators, writers and other artists via email. From the artist's standpoint, an email may seem too flimsy in this regard, but from the standpoint of art organizers it demands very little of their time to click a link. Especially if a website cuts to the chase and doesn't beseige them with Flash intros and the like.

You can also "hotlink" images from your site, if you would like to provide someone with an instantaneous view of images. This means that the URL links directly to a file, rather than a page that displays the file. For example, the rabbit drawing on the home page of this website could be linked this way:

http://www.ecbrown.org/tutorial/media/badRabbit.gif

When you create a hotlink, test it in your browser window to make sure you've constructed the pathway correctly.

It isn't recommended that you include images as attachments to your email, since many spam-blockers are sensitive to attachments. I'll sometimes make an exception with a small image, 50 KB or less, for a bit of visual ensnarement.

Online exposure

The value of online exposure, via reaching out to weblogs and artists indexes, is a debated subject. If something you made was deemed suitable for a BoingBoing post, you may suddenly have thousands of people whizzing through your site, but that isn't really an indicator of the depth of involvement from those viewers. On the other hand, podcasters and YouTube filmmakers have accomplished some interesting things in developing an audience outside of traditional channels, so there is some justification in hoping to have some interesting things happen by propelling your site into the Great Information Superhighway. An artist's portfolio site, however, may need to be coupled with extracurricular online events, website projects, or other promotional-strategies. More likely, the website can become most powerful as a local tool, where you can intertwine the strengths of both the keyboard and the handshake.

Nevertheless, I'll provide a short linkstack of places to consider approaching for some exposure:

Artblog.net
Artblog.net linkpage
Drawn!
GalleryDriver -- an art blog aggregator
WFMU's Beware of the Blog
Geisha Asobi
Rhizome -- a hub for "new media"
Furtherfield
Furtherfield linkpage
IndieNudes -- open to a wide spectrum between porn and artwork
AMEA: World Museum of Erotic Art
Portal of Evil


There have been various indexes of artists online (such as Digital Consciousness), but unless they are setting very particular or local parameters, these project will either be way too large to visitors to negotiate, or too spotty to impress them.