THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman: Here’s something I’ve noticed after years of looking at other artists websites. When an artist tells me their website isn’t leading to sales, I can almost always tell why in five minutes. And every single time the artist has spent months on their site, sometimes years agonizing over fonts, layout, the color of the buttons. Maybe this is you. Maybe you’ve written and rewritten your bio, uploaded, reloaded your images, and yeah, I get it. You care very deeply about it, but you still don’t generally understand why things aren’t selling. However, when I look at it, the problem usually is obvious. Not because I’m a web designer and not because the art isn’t good. But I look at the website the way a collector does and what I see almost every time it was built for something else entirely. And that’s what we’re talking about today, my website philosophy and specifically what it actually takes to build an artist website that converts. Hey, I’m Miriam Schulman, I’ve been an artist for over 25 years. I’m the author of Artpreneur The Step by Step Guide to Making a Sustainable Living from Your Creativity. And I’m your host here at The Inspiration Place now. I’ve been coaching artists for about seven years now through my Artist Incubator Program.
Miriam Schulman: Here’s the thesis. The problem isn’t that your website needs more features. The problem is that your website has too much friction between a collector and a yes. Now, my whole philosophy about artist websites comes down to one thing reduce the friction, reduce the obstacles between the collector and the sale. Everything on your website should be making it easier for the right person to find something, love it, understand it, make a decision and buy it. And most artists websites are doing the opposite. They’re adding steps. There’s too many choices. They’re creating confusion. They’re sending collectors away before a sale has ever had a chance to happen. So let’s talk about why your website is not your portfolio. Let’s start with what I think is the most foundational mistake, because a lot of it flows from this. Most artists treat their website like a portfolio or an expensive business card, and I get where that comes from. In art school, your portfolio was everything. It was how you got evaluated, how you got into shows, how you proved yourself. It was a record of your work and a demonstration of your range. But a portfolio and a storefront are completely different things. A portfolio is for you. It says, here is what I can do.
Miriam Schulman: Here is my history. Here is the breadth of what I’ve made. A storefront is for the buyer. It says, here’s what you can have, here is how to get it. Here is what it costs. Your website needs to be a storefront. And here’s what I really want you to hear. Listening. A storefront without prices and without a way to purchase isn’t a storefront at all. It’s just an expensive brochure. Think about that for a second. When you walk into a boutique, a nice one, the kind where you linger. You can see what they’re selling. There are usually price tags. And I say usually because there was a boutique in a town where Narrowsburg New York that I used to visit, and it was cute, but nothing had price tags. And guess what? I bought nothing in that store. And guess what? That store is now out of business. But usually there are price tags. You can pick it up. You can decide if you want it. You decide if you want to walk to the register. The entire environment is designed to make saying yes as easy as possible. Now imagine that same boutique with no price tags, nothing labeled. And when you ask about something you love.
Miriam Schulman: You’re handed a card and told to send an email and wait for someone to get back to you. How long would you stay? Now, that store that I mentioned in Narrowsburg, I got tired of asking her, how much is this? How much is that? And it was embarrassing. I didn’t want to ask. I wanted to know ahead of time, like what it costs. And then I’m only asking her, yeah, I want this. But if I have to ask for every single thing. That got annoying. That’s the experience of most artists websites, though, and the artists can’t figure out why no one’s buying. When I ask artists why they don’t show prices, I hear the same things over and over. Oh, I don’t want to scare people off. Oh, my prices vary. Oh, I prefer to discuss it personally. And every single one of those answers is about the artist’s comfort, not the collector experience. I was invited to talk about my book with a bunch of photographers, and one of them spent a long time trying to explain to me why you had to contact her to explain the packages, that every package was different. And I says, why don’t you just have those packages on your website? And she says, oh, once they apply, they learn about the packages. It’s like, no, make them fill out the form after they’ve paid you money, put packages on your website so they can decide first. She was losing so many sales. She could not see it, though. She was so married to her idea of what it should be. Here’s what the research actually shows. Visible prices increase. Buyers trust period finished the end. Collectors are more likely to buy when prices are shown up front. When the pricing is hidden, you create friction and uncertainty, and most people won’t push through that friction. They’ll just leave. And here’s the thing that surprises artists. Showing your prices might actually reduce the number of inquiries you get. And I know that sounds alarming, but fewer inquiries doesn’t mean fewer sales? It means you’re only hearing from people who are ready to buy from you. Those are better conversations.
Miriam Schulman: Pricing transparency does not cost you sales. It qualifies your buyers. Hey, quick pause because there’s something coming up that I think connects directly to what we’re talking about. A beautiful website isn’t enough if nobody is going to it. And one of my favorite places for you to build an audience of authentic connections right now is not Instagram. It’s actually LinkedIn. So before you tell me, Miriam, LinkedIn is for corporate people. Hear me out. I’ve watched artists get press opportunities, podcast invitations, speaking engagements, and more importantly, commissions, collector connections, art consulting connections, which led to sales simply by learning how to show up strategically there. And the best part? You don’t have to dance, chase trends, or even post every single day. And that’s why this summer, I’m hosting a live workshop where I’m going to show artists exactly how to use LinkedIn to build visibility and attract opportunities without feeling like they’re becoming full time content creators. We’re going to break down just the most basic things you need to do, and we’re cutting out all the fluff. So if you’ve been wondering where to build an audience and get authentic connections outside of Instagram, you don’t want to miss this workshop. You can grab your spot over at SchulmanArt.com/LinkedIn. All right, now let’s talk about the two kinds of artists websites that quietly sabotage sales. All right, let’s go back to the two types of broken websites, the two types of artists websites that don’t convert. All right. I said at the top that when I look at an artist’s website, I can spot the problem within five minutes.
Miriam Schulman: And really, it’s probably less. And honestly, it almost always come down to one of these two things, two types of websites. They look different on the surface, but they share the same fundamental flaw they weren’t designed for selling. The first type is what I call the gallery portfolio site. Now, there are artist platforms out there built specifically for artists. And yeah, I’m not going to name names because I’m not here to throw anybody’s business under the bus, but some of them are designed around how a traditional gallery presents art no prices, no buy button, and a lot of white space. Although a lot of these websites use a lot of black space, which I hate, by the way, that if you have black on your website, very dated, beautiful, elegant, but they’re completely passive. Now, here’s what I want you to understand about that model. It’s not just the wrong tool for independent artists selling directly. It’s a totally broken model. Period. We’re watching traditional galleries close at an alarming rate. The ones that are still operating on that no prices call the director approach. They’re struggling. And the galleries that are actually thriving. Many of them have modernized. They show prices on their websites. They make it easier to buy. They’ve adapted to how collectors actually shop today. So when an artist builds their website on a platform that mimics the old gallery model, they’re not just picking the wrong tool for their situation. They’re modeling themselves after a system that the market has already started to reject.
Miriam Schulman: The old gatekeeping mystique around art pricing, the idea that showing a price somehow cheapens the work. That’s not protecting your art, it’s costing you sales and galleries are learning that lesson the hard way. If you’re a working artist selling directly to collectors, a website designed around that old gallery philosophy is not a website designed for direct sales. It’s a portfolio dressed up as a storefront and collectors. They can’t buy that way. They don’t like to shop that way. Now, before I get into the second type of website, if you’re finding the content on this video useful, I share content like this every single week at the Inspiration Place. So make sure you hit subscribe and maybe even the notification bell so you don’t miss out on any of it. Okay? The second type is what I call a print factory. Again, I’m not naming names, but there are platforms designed around print on demand, and some artists build their entire website on these platforms, which means that their website, leads with prints, it leads with products, it leads with mugs and phone cases, and throw pillows and framed prints in 17 different sizes and six different substrates. And somewhere buried in there are originals.
Miriam Schulman: Here’s the problem with that. The collector who buys a $3,000 original painting is not the same person browsing for a $25 coffee mug. And yes, if you’re a photographer and you want to sell limited edition fine art photographs, the person shopping for $3,000 photograph is not interested in your coffee mug. When you lead with print on demand, you’re signaling to the high end collector that this isn’t really a fine art destination. It’s a product shop. It’s like Cafe Press.
Miriam Schulman: You don’t want your art to be a cafe press. And the decision fatigue is real. When someone lands on your site and immediately has to choose between originals, prints, canvas, wrap, metal prints, a dozen other options before they even get to see your actual work. Most of them are just going to leave. You’re not serving your collector. Your over whelming them. If they’re confused about which option is better, they rather just not make a choice and they will leave. Honestly, this disease of too many options spreads beyond the print factory type. I see this all the time and otherwise decent websites artists teaching their site like an art history project. Work sorted by years 2019 2020, 2021. Tabs for every single series they’ve ever explored, every piece they’ve ever made since they picked up a brush or a camera or a lump of clay and presented it as if it all deserves equal real estate. It doesn’t. Your job is to make decisions for your collector, not hand them a thousand options and hope they figure it out and wish them luck the same way. You’re not offering prints in 17 sizes. Don’t show every piece you’ve ever made. Ruthlessly curate. Decide what represents your best work. Decide what sizes to offer for prints. Pick one. Two at most three, but definitely not 12. You present a cohesive, confident body of work and then that can do the selling. Curating is not hiding your work. Curating is being respectful of your collectors time and attention. The artists who sell the most are almost never the ones with the most work on their website. They’re the ones who’ve made it the easiest to fall in love with what’s there now. Both of these website types have the same underlying problem. They’re organized around something other than the collector’s path to purchase one is built on an outdated gallery model.
Miriam Schulman: The market is already moving away from, and the other is organized around a platform’s product catalog. Neither is organized around what a high end, wealthy collector actually needs to fall in love with your art and say yes. So I want to know which one of these two sounds like your website right now. Gallery portfolio or the print factory or something else. Artists confuse features with conversions. There is a seductive logic behind both of these website types. More options means more way to sell. More integrations mean more revenue streams. More features means more professionalism. But features don’t create sales. Connection does. Print and demand doesn’t create demand. It fulfills demand that already exists. If a collector isn’t already looking for your work, a print shop isn’t going to change that. And if they are looking for your work, they found you and they love your art and they’re ready to buy. The last thing you want for them is to get distracted by a product catalog. Before they can find an original. And automations. They don’t create collectors either. They serve collectors who already exist, and there’s definitely a time and place for an email sequence and segmentation and cart reminders and things like that. But that’s not your first problem. Your first problem is making it possible to actually complete a purchase easily in the first place. So integrations don’t create trust. Trust comes from your story, your work and consistency and categories don’t create emotional connection. Organize your work by size, color, year. That might make sense to you logistically, but not to the collector. Collectors don’t fall in love with the category and collectors. They don’t want to be browsing art from 2020 in the year 2026.
Miriam Schulman: So what actually drives sales on an artist’s website? Okay, the first one is obvious the art itself, but also the clarity of what’s available, the price right there where they can see it, the story of who you are and the ease of being able to say yes without jumping through hoops. Everything else is a distraction until those fundamentals are in place. What collectors actually want. Let me walk you through what’s actually going through a collector’s mind when they land on your website. Because I think when artists understand this, a lot of the decisions become more obvious. A collector finds your work maybe through social media, maybe through a friend, maybe through a show. Maybe you’ve driven them there through your email and something catches their eye. They’re interested, so they click through. In the first few seconds, they’re asking themselves five questions, not consciously, but they’re asking, can I see the work clearly? Not just a thumbnail, not a cropped image that cuts off the edges. A real well lit photo that lets them see the colors accurately and get a sense of the texture and the detail. If your images aren’t great, you’re losing sales before anything else happens. It doesn’t matter what kind of website you have. Can I understand how big it is? This is enormous and artists underestimate it constantly. A collector cannot buy a piece they can’t visualize in their home. Is it going to fill a wall or fit on a shelf? Is it an intimate piece or a statement piece? It’s great to share the dimensions.
Miriam Schulman: However, it’s even better to show them what it looks like in a room. They’re going to ask, do I know the price? We’ve covered this. I’ve talked about it lots of times, but I still need to mention it again. Visible a number. Not inquire. Not contact for pricing. Not contact for shipping a number. They’re going to ask do I feel something? This is where your story comes in your about page, the way you talk about your art, the sense of who you are as a person. All of this is going to contribute to whether a collector feels emotionally invested. They’re not just buying an object, they’re buying a piece of someone’s inner world, and they want to understand whose world that is. That’s why the about page matters more than most artists realize. And finally, do I know what to do next? If a collector is ready to buy and your checkout is unclear, or worse, if there’s no real checkout at all, you’ve lost the sale at the finish line, there should be a visible buy button, a clear add to cart, a trustworthy checkout and ideally, some clarity about what happens after purchase and when does it ship? How is it packaged? And what if something goes wrong? So your website needs to answer all five of those questions quickly and clearly. If you’ve done that, you’ve done your job.
Miriam Schulman: Collectors should never have to hunt for any of that information. Okay. Honestly, how many of those five questions does your website answer right now? The reasons artists overcomplicate their websites. The website should support the business, not become the business. This brings me to something I feel very strongly about. Your website is not your business. Your business is making strong artwork. Your business is building an audience. People who follow you, who know you, who have a relationship with what you create. Your business is nurturing your collectors through email. The people who’ve already bought from you already in your world. Your business is following up. Your business is asking for the sale. The website exists to reduce friction in that process. That’s its job. It’s a tool, a very important tool, but a tool. And like any tool, it should be in the service of the artwork, not the other way around. That’s why I don’t like those print factory sites. Here’s where email fits into all of this because I think it’s directly connected. Your email list is your most valuable asset as an artist, not your follower count, not even your website traffic. Your email list. Those are real people who have raised their hand and said, I want to hear from you. I want to stay in your world. Your website should be working constantly to grow that list with a clear, compelling reason to sign up.
Miriam Schulman: And once someone is on your list, the website becomes almost secondary. The relationship lives in the inbox. You can tell them about new work, give them first access. Share the story behind a piece. Follow up. Personally, You can close a sale via email and often that’s exactly what happens. The collector who buys doesn’t always buy in their first visit to your website. Often they buy after the fifth or the sixth email, or when you send a note that says, hey, this piece has been on my mind a while and I wanted to give you a chance to see it before I list it publicly. That’s a relationship. That’s what drives sales. And that’s why I want to gently challenge you. If you spend many hours on your website in the last six months, but haven’t sent out a single email to your list in that time, something’s out of balance. Website work can feel like high functioning productivity, but it might be the most sophisticated form of procrastination you’ve ever encountered. That doesn’t mean don’t fix what we’ve been talking about, but if you’re spending too much time tweaking, updating fonts, color, fonts, and colors, they don’t even really matter that much. Is there a buy button? Is the price listed? Is the shipping listed? Have I curated it? That’s what you need to do. Before we get into what I actually recommend, I want to take a second to tell you why I’m giving all of this information away for free.
Miriam Schulman: Over the years, I’ve noticed something. My most successful clients almost always arrive with websites already built around this philosophy. They understand that their website is a sales tool, not a digital resume, not an expensive portfolio brochure, not a print on demand site. When artists come to me, built with the opposite approach, they can end up spending months on doing the damage before our real work can even begin. So I rather teach this to you now for free. Whether you ever work with me or not, I want you to build your art business on a strong foundation. And if this is resonating and you’re thinking, okay, but how do I actually put all this into practice? I’d love to invite you to my free masterclass, How to sell more art without being Insta famous. I’ll walk you through the exact framework I teach inside the Artist Incubator, the same framework that’s helped thousands of artists move from hoping collectors find them to consistently attracting sales of opportunities. And many of my artists have gotten over the six figure mark. And that’s not marketing hype. That’s facts. You can register at SchulmanArt.com/sellmoreart. The link is in the description. All right. Let’s talk about what a website that actually converts looks like. If it’s not a gallery portfolio site, if not a print factory, what does a working artist’s website actually look like? For most artists selling original work, I recommend that you use either Squarespace or Shopify.
Miriam Schulman: Both are professional, well supported, and built for selling. Squarespace tends to feel a little more elegant for higher end originals, but Shopify is extremely powerful if you have more volume or a mix of originals and prints, and really, you can’t go wrong either way. If you have one of those two, it’s like a toaster. They both work. Either one is a significant upgrade over platforms that weren’t designed with direct to collector sales in mind. So here’s what belongs on your website and why each piece matters in the order of priority. Okay, number one a clean home page. Home or start here. This is your storefront window. A collector should know within really five seconds what you make and what they can do next. Usually means one stunning hero image of your art. Sometimes it’s a slideshow, ideally available. A single clear line about who you are. Not a full welcome message, not a paragraph about your journey. Just an image and maybe a button like welcome. Explore the collection. Okay, next. An about page. And here’s something most artists don’t realize. After the homepage, the about page is the second most visited page on your entire website. Collectors go there before they buy. So this page matters enormously and not in the way most artists think. The about page is not a description of your subject matter. It’s not a CV.
Miriam Schulman: It’s not a. Here are all the shows I participated in and it’s not. I’m a landscape artist who creates work featuring sailboats and lakes and Pacific Northwest. That’s fine, but that just tells your collector what your subjects are. It doesn’t tell them why it matters or what it does for them emotionally. And what collectors actually connect with is the psychological world of your art. Not the sailboat, not the bear, not the specific lake you photographed, the feeling, the inner experience is your work about stillness. Is it about wildness? Is it about nostalgia for something we can’t quite name? Is it about the light makes ordinary things feel sacred. Is it about the liminal space that’s your through line, and your about page is where you articulate that world. So a collector reads it and thinks, yes, that’s exactly what I feel when I look at your work. That’s why I need it in my home. Now, I’ll be honest with you, this is one of the hardest things for artists to do on their own. Most of us are so close to our work that we can’t see it from the outside. We describe the subject because the feeling is so much harder to name that excavation process. Figuring out the emotional world you’re actually building. That’s deep work. It’s some of my most important work I do with my clients. But even if you can’t fully articulate it yet, the goal is to move your about page away from subject matter only and toward feelings.
Miriam Schulman: That shift alone will change how collectors experience your site. One more thing when you name this, you can label this about or about your name. Both work or about the artist, but what doesn’t work is skipping it, or maybe hiding it at the bottom of the home page where no one finds it. All right. Next you need. So we have home. We have about the artist. The next one is Art for sale and not shop. I want to say that clearly because most artists use a template and the default navigation label is always shop. Please, please don’t use the word shop. Please change it. Shop signals a product store art for sale signals exactly what it is. It’s a small thing that sends a big message about how you position your art. Now, if you sell both originals and prints, you can create two submenus under Art for sale. Original art and prints. Clean. Clear. No confusion about what a collector is looking at. The collector who’s ready to spend 2000 on an original, should never have to sort through a print catalog to find that, okay, we’ve been through this visible pricing on the page next to the piece. A number every single time. Okay, next I have to say a word on the galleries tab. This one drives me crazy and I want to address it directly.
Miriam Schulman: Only have galleries tab on your website if you are actually represented by galleries. If I click on that tab, it better show me which galleries carry your work name location, a link that’s useful, that builds credibility. What it should not be is a tab that leads to your own collections of work, organized as if you’re creating a museum of your art. No. That’s confusing. Collector who clicks on galleries is expecting to find out where they can see your work in person, or which galleries represent you if they land on more of your own art instead. They don’t want to know what they’re looking at or why that section exists. Okay, now, if you’re not in galleries yet, cool. Completely fine. Just don’t have that tap. You don’t need it. Okay. I have to say, this e-commerce enabled a real buy button, an add to cart, A clean checkout that doesn’t require creating an account. A confirmation email. Make it possible to go from. I love this to. I bought this without sending you a single email or waiting for a response. Hey, you need a way for people to sign up for your email. Clear reason to join? Here’s one you can use. Be the first to see new work, or get studio updates and collect or access something like that. Something that communicates value, not just sign up for my newsletter because newsletters feel like more email and nobody needs more email.
Miriam Schulman: But first, access to new pieces. That’s a reason. Yes, please. All right. You need a simple, trustworthy checkout. Every extra click is an opportunity for collectors to change their mind, get distracted, whatever. So keep it clean. Collect what you need. Payment, shipping. Confirm the order done. No unnecessary steps. That’s it. That’s the whole list. If your website has all those things, congratulations, you’ve done well and you’re ahead of the vast majority of artists websites I’ve seen. Everything beyond that is optional, and most of it you don’t even need. Here’s what I want you to take away from today. Your website has one job. Reduce friction between collector and yes not impressed people. Not demonstrate your range. Not showcase every possible way to buy something with your art on it. Reduce friction between the collector and a yes, that means a clean home page, a clear path forward available work that’s one click away with prices visible on every page. A strong about page that make the collectors feel like they know you and understand why your art matters. E-commerce that actually works. An email signup that keeps people in your world even when they’re not ready to buy today, doesn’t mean a gallery portfolio site that looks beautiful, but makes it impossible to actually purchase anything. It doesn’t mean a print factory that overwhelms collectors with options and buries your originals under a product catalog.
Miriam Schulman: The artists I’ve seen transform their sales didn’t do it by adding features. They did it by removing friction. They made it easier to find the work, easier to understand it, and easier to say yes. And the sales followed. Collectors don’t buy art because your website has more features. They buy art because your website makes it easy to fall in love, easy to trust you, and easy to say yes. That’s the whole job. Pick one thing you learned today on this episode. Put it into place. Just one. Just one. Start there. Now, if you want to go deeper on this, come join me in the free masterclass SchulmanArt.com/sellmoreart. And if this episode was helpful, share it with another artist who needs to hear it. They will. Thank you. And next week we’re talking about how to build an art collection with a clear point of view. That one’s good. An artist at all levels need to hear this one. So make sure you’re subscribed and hit that notification bell so you’re alerted as soon as it drops. You’re not going to want to miss it. I’ll see you the same time, same place next week. Until then, stay inspired. Bye for now.
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