How my website was made, and who made it.

It started with a conversation, not a template

Before anything was drawn, MyDiro asked me about the work: what I paint, who buys it, what people ask me in my DMs, and what I was fed up of doing by hand. Then they looked at how people actually search for original art around Stoke-on-Trent and further out, and what the artists I admire do well on their own sites.

That decided the shape of it. The paintings come first, every one has its own page with the price on it, and the rest of the site is built around that.

A site that looks like my studio

I did not want a white gallery box. The colours are mine: the cream and mustard from my logo, the olive heart, the pink from the paintings. The headings are set in a hairline serif, the sort of thing I would scribble on a label, and the pages move the way the work does, a bit loose, nothing too neat.

It is built for a phone first, because that is where most of you find me. The paintings are big, the prices are plain, and nothing gets in the way.

Every painting, priced and ready to buy

Each original has its own page: the size, the medium, a proper look at the surface, and the price. Buy it and I get the order straight away, you get an invoice by email, and the painting is packed and couriered or kept back for you to collect. Sold work stays up, marked sold, so you can see what has gone before and ask for something in the same spirit.

There is a commissions page that explains how a made-to-order painting works, a workshops page for when I run them, and a journal where I write about what is on the easel.

I add new work from my phone

This is the bit that changed my week. MyDiro built me a small private admin where I photograph a painting, type the size and the price, and press Publish. The site rebuilds itself, the new painting is on its page and on the wall within a few minutes, and nobody has to touch any code. The same admin holds the enquiries, the orders and the mailing list.

When something new goes up, the people on the list hear first. That is all the list is for.

Found beyond Instagram

Until the site, sales only came from social media. Now every painting is written up in the way Google and the shopping tabs understand, with its own picture, price and address, and the site keeps that up to date on its own every time I publish. So the work can be found by someone who has never seen my feed.

Checked before it goes live

Every time the site is updated, it checks itself before anything is published: every page has to say what it is, the working notes behind the design are stripped out, and if something does not add up the update stops and the live site stays as it was. The site sets no cookies and shows no advertising. What it keeps and why is on the privacy page, in plain words.

Looked after, not just built

The site runs on fast hosting and MyDiro look after it: updates, new pages when I need them, a monthly reel cut from my own footage, and a check that everything still works. I paint. They do the rest.