Last Thursday I was waiting to see my 8-year old’s school play and was chatting to a parent friend who was standing in the line next to us.

She is a great artist who is currently showing her work at an exhibition in London, but she revealed that she didn’t have a website or own her own .com domain.

A couple of hours after the play ended I bought her domain name for her. I also offered - if she wanted - to build her a website for free.

I have quite a bit of experience using Squarespace to build websites (including this site) and I felt like this might be the sort of thing where a built-in template would probably meet most of her requirements without much need for tweaking.

We met the next day to discuss what options were available and less than a week later her website — meganyelets.com — is now live (built to her specifications)!

Building a site for an artist

This is a very different type of project compared to anything else I have done in my years of managing and building websites. After we had reviewed some other artist’s websites, Megan had requested that she wanted a big cover image on the home page that would lead into a gallery of some of her images.

It quickly became apparent to me that we needed the whole focus to be on the art itself. Consequently this led me to keep everything else relatively plain and unobtrusive.

I probably had the first draft of the site all complete with a couple of hours. I then spent many more hours doing lots of fine tweaking.

Frustratingly, I discovered that although Squarespace lets you add custom code and CSS while you are buildign the site (i.e. while you are effectively on a free plan) but as soon as the site goes live, your custom code will be removed if you are on their base level plan.

I only realised this after the site went live and so I then had to find a workaround as I didn’t think it was worth a £60 per year upgrade to the plan just to get this one extra feature.

Next steps

Megan is very happy with the results and I hope that she now has a platform to help showcase her lovely art to a wider audience.

As for me, there is still some work to be done and I hope to set her up with a newsletter service so she can more easily share updates with people interested in her work.