WordPress For Artists

A complete guide for using WordPress for art, writing, creating, & creative.

For the creative mind, it is easy to get lost in the process when building a website. The questions and choices seem endless:

What host should I use?
Should I use WordPress?
Which theme should I use?
Which gallery/social/form plugins?
How do I avoid making it look like a blog?
How do I sell my work?
How do I manage an email list?
Should I have a forum?
How do I get my site to rank higher on Google?
How do I make my site load faster?
Ok, but which Cache plugin should I use?

Finally, as an artist who simply wants to spend your time creating, you ask:

Is this even worth it?

The answer: It is. A well-done WordPress site can change your professional life. And it can be done quickly and efficiently with minimal headaches.

This simple tutorial, written specifically for artists, writers, and creators, will take you through it step-by-step, coaching you on how to put together your WordPress site, newsletter, membership forum, and/or online store with the ease of a pro whose been doing it for years.

Fair warning: There will be no bullsh*t. This isn’t art. This is craft. The goal will be to get in, get out, and get back to your Work. No assistance will be given to procrastination in any way.

Table of Contents

1. Objectives. Defining the Work. And its limits.

The world wide web is littered with the bodies of those artists who became caught up in designing a website. Artists who got lost somewhere and became designers who took a left at the technical and became plugin developers, web gurus, social media experts, and, saddest of the lot, lifestyle design coaches.

Use their productive procrastination to your benefit, but do not mirror their mistakes.

Don’t join a WordPress group or an SEO forum or a funnel marketing newsletter. The development community is a kind one, but it is not your community. You are not a wine shop owner looking to extend his clientel or a small printer in Buloxi looking to take your t-shirt ideas to the masses: the types that can benefit from such communities and integrate their proposed strategies seamlessly with their daily labors.

You are an artist. And no one kills time like an artist.

As with any creative mind, you are highly susceptible to distraction. You can lose yourself in “research” with relative ease, and justify it as necessity with the certainty and resolve of a heroin addict. When it comes to the internet, it is best for you to get in there, do what you need to do, and get the hell out.

So what do you need? What don’t you need?

WordPress can be divided into three convenient Acts:

1. Set up the back end. (server, etc)
2. Set up the front end. (design)
3. Place signs on major roads to get people in the door. (seo, conversation)

It will be the job of your work (what the truly dead refer to as “content” – link to stimulis vs content article-) to keep them there.

2. Fundamentals. Why WordPress?

After 15 years of updates and evolution, Mike & Matt’s little blog platform has become the most robust and expandable content management platform available. There is little to nothing that a WordPress site cannot be made to do cleanly and efficiently.

For artists, WordPress ticks off every need on our list, allowing us to create a robust website for sharing and selling our Work, gathering patrons, and building a community.

For full control over a site and its appearance, WordPress has no rival.

With site builders like Weebly and Wix, you are clocked in to their system, with only moderate control over your SEO, and little to no control over site speed. With WordPress, hosted on your own server, the site’s failure or success is entirely in your hands. And should you decide to change hosts, move servers, change your SEO strategy, or redesign the site altogether at a later date, you are free to do so.

3. Social. What about Instagram & Facebook?

Everything you’ve heard about Instagram and Facebook from social media “experts” is wrong.

Your Instagram followers and Facebook likers are not your Tribe.

When someone likes your Facebook page, that like belongs to Facebook. When someone follows your Instagram profile, that new follower belongs to Instagram. If Instagram closes down tomorrow, that follower follows Instagram into the void. (Ask anyone who owned a successful Vine account.)

If your account is hacked, hijacked, or simply removed by Facebook or Instagram, all those carefully cultivated relationships are gone.

And if and when Instagram again changes its algorithm, so as to encourage business users to buy ads to reach their audience (as Facebook did), your audience will be there…but they won’t see you.

Social media channels are a means to an end.

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and the rest are funnels. They should channel users in a very specific direction.

And what direction is that?

The answer is simple: Towards you.

The aim of social media is to convert Instagram follows and Facebook likes into Email Subscribers.

Your Email Subscribers are your Tribe.

Subscribers belong to you. Your email list belongs to you. Your email list will survive the death of Instagram or the changing of its algorithm. And with that list you can better engage your Tribe directly.

4. Alternatives. What about Etsy? Or Shopify?

Etsy is a very tempting setting for artists trying to sell their work: The clean aesthetic, the easy setup, and the automated payment processing make for major conveniences. But it is a marketplace solution. it offers no means for you to showcase your work outside of the consumer context. You and your work are simply products to sell. There is nothing more to you on Etsy.

This is true of Shopify as well. And as with Wix and Weebly, with Shopify you are limited to and stuck with a small number of plugins that cannot and will not scale with your success.

You want a place for your Tribe to purchase your work, but so too do you need a place to host said tribe. A place for them to congregate.

Think of an Etsy account as you would think of any other social media platform. Think of Etsy as a means for acquiring an audience. Don’t let it be where you send your audience.

Below we will explain how to quickly and easily set up your own Shopping Cart system. In the interim, go ahead and sign up for a free Stripe account and Paypal Business account. This will speed up the process later on when it’s time to get the ecommerce elements of your site going.

5. Domain. Choosing & registering a Domain

This doesn’t need to be complicated.

Go to Namecheap.com. There are a number of articles outlining why it is one of the best dependable Registrars, but suffice to say, they are good, efficient, have a low signal to noise ratio, and stay out of the way. And they aren’t owned by EIG.

Choose a .com rather than anything else. Make it yourname.com or, worst case scenario, yournameart.com or byyourname.com. You are not a .org or a .net or a .ly. Don’t get cute. The aim is to be memorable. People remember the name and put a .com behind it.

Have a clever Instagram username or handle? Spend another 10 bucks and buy that domain name too. Then redirect it to yourname.com.

6. Serve. What to look for in a Hosting Service.

The internet is filled with cheap hosting offers. The likes of Hostgator, GoDaddy, and Domains.com parade unlimited disk space and gigabytes of transfer data.

Don’t go anywhere near them.

For the most part these shared hosting packages are horrible. There is no support beyond the sales pitch*, and you will often find yourself on a server with a thousand other sites, most of which spend the day (and the server’s resources) sending out spam. And, finally, when it comes time to renew these services, you’ll find the price has suddenly risen, sending you on a quest to move your site to another host so as to take advantage of yet another too-good-to-be-true offer.

So where should you host?

Let’s narrow it down to a single option, based on the combined customer satisfaction reports found on various WordPress groups, forums, and review sites as well as ease of use: Host with SiteGround.

Recommended Host

SiteGround

If you’re just starting out, sign up with SiteGround’s semi-dedicated hosting plan: GoGeek.

Why?

1. Support. SiteGround has one of the best support staffs online. In any field. Period. They are friendly, helpful always accessible, articulate, and well-skilled. And they’re patient. Ridiculously patient. Especially when it comes to a novice’s silly questions. As an artist, you will have questions. The folks at SiteGround will happily give you answers. It is one of the many reasons they are consistently ranked as the best shared hosting service for WordPress sites.

2. Speed. SiteGround offers server locations in Chicago, London, Amsterdam, Milan, and Singapore. (When you sign-up you’ll be offered a choice as to which one you’d prefer to have your site hosted on. Choose the one nearest to your target audience.) These servers have consistent, near 100% uptime, and they are well-kept and continuously updated.

This should provide you with ample resources for a Tribe of 10,000 or so, visiting frequently, with plenty of room for new visitors. If and when you grow beyond the confines of those numbers, talk to SiteGround about their dedicated hosting plans and/or speak with other recommended hosts such as WPEngine and Kinsta. Let them work for your business.

(*Whatever you do, avoid EIG hosts like iPage or HostGator. A quick Google search of “EIG sucks” should explain why.)

Regardless of whom you choose, once you’ve purchased your hosting plan, go to the cPanel (or equivalent) area and get started.

7. Validity. Let’s Encrypt SSL

All of the recommended hosting services above offer quick and easy installation of Let’s Encrypt’s free security certificates. (the thing that puts the s in the green https:// you see on higher-quality sites.

You need this. You need it to secure your site visitors’ purchases, and you need it to better meet with Google’s approval in search listings. And it is best to do this in the beginning so as to avoid losing your Google site ranking when making thew switch from http to https later.

Before you do anything else, install your SSL certificate. Here’s how, using SiteGround’s cPanel as an example:

In your host’s CPanel, go down to the Security section and click the Let’s Encrypt icon.

Once there, go down to Install new Let’s Encrypt Certificate and choose your domain from the dropdown menu. Click Install.

Once successfully installed, go the list of Installed Certificates and Turn On HTTPS Enforce.

8. WordPress Install. Initial install & setup.

Go to the WordPress Tools section of your host’s CPanel and click the WordPress Installer icon.

This will open the Softaculous installation app. Click Install Now.

In the Install area, under Software Setup > Choose Protocol, select https:// from the dropdown menu. Then choose your domain from the list, name your WordPress site, and give yourself a good strong admin name and password. Once done, click Install.

The wizard will take a few moments to install WordPress’s files and database on your server. Once completed, it will list your WordPress admin address (https://yoursite.com/wp-admin). Follow the link and login to your WordPress site.

The adventure has officially begun. Grab a coffee, tea, or other natural stimulant. Now we go to work.

9. Design. Recommended Themes & Plugins.

This is the moment with the biggest risk for artists and creatives.

What kind of risk?

The risk for procrastination.

This is the most likely place for a creative to dawdle, going back and forth between this color or that, this font or that, and this overall aesthetic experience or that. In an attempt to make our site itself into a piece of art, our real Work waits in the background collecting dust. But a website is not art.

Don’t get lost here.

Treat this moment as a critical period to push through, choosing a theme as quickly as possible. One that addresses all of your functional needs while leaving room for your art to take center stage.

Recommended Themes

There are hundreds of free themes available in the WordPress Theme Directory. (Accessible via your WordPress Dashboard under Appearance>Themes>Add New.) Most of them are outfitted with responsive design that will work on a desktop, tablet, or mobile phone with equal ease. Many of them are exceptionally well-coded. Quite a few are beautiful.

Don’t use a single one of them.

You’re not going to like this, but it is essential to your progress: Buy a theme.

More specifically, buy a theme from StudioPress.

Why use a StudioPress Theme?

StudioPress offers everything that a creator is looking for in a theme.

1. They are well-coded. Every StudioPress is built on the Genesis Framework (which is included in every theme’s price.) A framework is a structure that bridges the gap between WordPress and a theme, serving as a structural foundation for the theme’s design and functions. (You can read more about it in this convenient PDF.) To put it simply, for you this means that each theme is free of coding errors, absent excessive and unnecessary scripts, optimized for search engines, built on the newest CSS3 and HTML5 web standards, and set up to automatically-update.

2. They are beautifully designed. Each of StudioPress’s themes is lightweight, clean, responsive, and made to focus on and feature your content. They draw the eye to your Work rather than to the theme itself. And there is a huge selection to choose from.

3. They are easy to customize. The themes are easy to tailor to match your branding and aesthetics. You aren’t locked into a single way of presenting the Work.

4. They are well-supported. You aren’t a coder. With StudioPress, you don’t need to worry about running into problems during development. Each theme is backed by their support staff as well as a plethora of documentation and FAQs. And they are extremely helpful when answering your questions.

5. They are secure. You don’t have time to worry about an out-dated theme. Whereas WordPress Directory themes can often go years without being updated, each of StudioPress’s themes is constantly accessed for issues. Holes are plugged, and the backend of your site is automatically-updated. No worries for you. No web security learning curve to pass through.

6. They are shop & forum ready. Nearly all of StudioPress’s themes support WooCommerce and Buddypress/bbPress. Our recommended storefront and forum plugins, respectively. To be sure, choose ecommerce from the Sort By menu.

7. They are affordable. Though they aren’t free, the prices are reasonable. And they aren’t “rented” as an annual license. You buy them and you own them forever. When you factor in the many hours you will save by choosing a theme that doesn’t require constant coding, security patching, and persistent maintenance, you are saving money.

Look through their gallery showcase and decide for yourself.

Other Theme Options

There are several hundred other frameworks and theme repositories, from Pagelines to ThemeForest, but, from experience, they aren’t recommended. Many of them, even the paid themes, suffer from a ridiculous amount of coding bloat that makes them take far too long to load and poorly effects both page speed and SEO ranking.

Recommended Plugins

The plugins below were chosen for speed and responsiveness, and are the ones most often recommended in WordPress Speed forums and user groups. They load very quickly while still providing you solid, well-designed features.

Visual Editor Plugins

WordPress has a built-in visual editor and an HTML editor that work quite nicely. But if you want a bit more freedom to move things around visually, in a WYSIWYG environ, install Beaver Builder Lite. Coupled with your Genesis theme’s Customize area, it should supply you with all the basic editing solutions you require.

Whatever you do, stay away from heavier visual editors such as WPBakery (formerly Visual Composer) and Divi Builder. They will slow down and clutter your site’s HTML markup considerably.

Gallery Plugins

First and foremost, go through the Image Optimization Checklist before uploading a single image to your site.

Once that is out of the way, choose your display preference.

In general, you should avoid gallery plugins that double as management tools, such as NextGen Gallery, as they tend to slow down your site substantially. Stick to WordPress’s built-in Media File Manager.

If you’re the type who likes slideshows of your works, MetaSlider has a sterling reputation for speed.

Contact Form Plugins

This is the plugin responsible for submitting your users’ forms, be it a contact request or a newsletter signup. This is a critical piece of kit, as it will be the main gateway from your site to your Email Subscription setup. As such, it should be capable of talking to Mailchimp and/or ConvertKit (about which we’ll learn more below).

Ninja Forms is a well-maintained, clean forms plugin, and it is also easily expandable. It isn’t the lightest forms plugin available (that honor goes to Caldera Forms), but it isn’t cumbersome either, and it is somewhat easier to use than Caldera and others.

The biggest plus for Ninja Forms is that in can be coupled with the free MailChimp For WordPress plugin for easy integration of your website’s various forms with your MailChimp account. For example, anyone contacting you via the contact form can be automatically signed up to your Email Subscriber’s List via a small checkbox at the bottom of the form. (This feature is available as a paid add-on for Caldera Forms, of course, but best to save a few bucks where you can.)

Contact Form 7 is equally popular, but it’s also notorious for causing site lag, and Gravity Forms is excellent but expensive.

Social Sharing Plugins

To add a nice set of Share buttons, allowing your users to share your post or page to Facebook and other social networks with a simple click, use Sassy Social Share. Sassy though it may be, it is also incredibly lightweight. Which is an attribute many other social plugins don’t sport.

Comments Systems

There are a great many options here, from Disqus to Facebook Comments system, all of which offer great looking alternatives to WordPress’s rather boring built-in comments section.

Don’t use any of them.

Instead, take control of the WordPress Comments section by pointing your users to your subscription-based bbPress forum area (which we’ll cover in detail below.) For users who elect not to subscribe, but to use the page or post’s comments instead, try adding the WP User Avatar plugin and changing the default user avatar. This will significantly speed up the WordPress comments area, as the system will no longer have to download the off-site avatar/gravatar for each individual user.

Coming Soon/Maintenance Plugin

In order to keep a “coming soon” notice up during the configuration or maintenance process of your site’s construction, install and enable SeedProd’s Coming Soon plugin. It’s free features do the job quite nicely, but if you’re planning on any long down times, then the Pro version is worth the extra few bucks.

10. Speed. WP Rocket + MaxCDN + CloudFlare.

Once we’ve got your site set up with pretty pictures, eloquent prose, properly dotted i’s and t’s, and underlined links, the exhilarating feelings of accomplishment and completion can sometimes lead us to forget our main objective: Getting a$$es in the seats.

Your audience stills needs to find your site. And, once found, your site needs to load as quickly as possible.

The majority of viewers will hit the back button if a page fails to fully load within a second or two. In order to get people to explore your site, you need to make certain that all of those pretty pictures are served to their browser in a blink. In order to achieve this we are going to make use of three elements:

1. A WordPress speed optimization plugin. (In this case, WP Rocket.)

2. A Content Delivery network that stores your files on servers around the world in order to more quickly deliver your images to your users when they click on your site’s pages. (In this case, MaxCDN.)

3. A content backup service that will continue delivering images even when your site is slowed down by the casual DDOS attacks that threaten the internet these days.(In this case, CloudFlare.)

For a thorough understanding of how this works and to set up these tools, take a look at our WP Rocket + MaxCDN + CloudFlare Guide.

(Ignore the WordPress and SSL instructions at the beginning, as you’ve already completed those tasks, follow the WP Rocket, Cloudflare, and MaxCDN setup instructions, and head back here once done.)

11. SEO. Yoast, Schema.org, & Google Search Console.

Now that you’ve built your site, it is your job to make sure your viewers can find it.

Without going into great detail about how Google Search indexes web pages and presents them in search results, it is important that you understand two things: Meta Data and Search Engine Optimization.

Meta Data are those key words and terms found throughout your page’s text and images that allow Google’s Search algorithm to understand what your page is about and to prioritize it in search results.

Search Engine Optimization is the sum total of the meta data that you pepper throughout your page to aid Google in indexing your site.

First, install Yoast SEO. This plugin alone will aid greatly in editing each page’s Title and Meta Description for better SEO, but when coupled with the recommendations found in our SEO Copywriting Checklist, it can quickly and easily raise page’s to the top of the search results.

12. Newsletter. Own your Tribe.

This is the most important aspect of your site’s backend. So let’s stop here and go over it separately from the rest of the WordPress install.

Take a moment and read through our guide, Email List Building For Artists. Then come back here to continue.

13. Store. WooCommerce

If you’ve decided to sell your work directly on your site rather than via Etsy or the like, then you can’t get any better than WooCommerce.

Install the plugin and begin integrating it with your WordPress site by following the Action Checklist below.

14. Tribe. Membership Plugin or Patreon?

If you plan to offer some of your pages to subscribers only, or to hide specific downloads, images, posts, and/or resources from the general public, then you’re going to want to install MemberPress.

MemberPress is the perfect platform for managing clients and patrons, allowing you to choose who sees what, either instantly or by “dripping” content to members bit-by-bit over time, through the creation of membership levels based on one-time donations or monthly patron pledges.

This is the professional’s alternative to Patreon, as, unlike Patreon, it keeps your users on your site and does not tether you to any sudden change in Patreon policies or pricing.

NOTE: We’ll soon be adding a comprehensive guide for using MemberPress, LearnDash, BuddyPress and bbPress in concert. – April 2018.

15. Courses. Selling your own courses.

If you plan on offering courses or tutorials of any type, use LearnDash Plus.

It integrates beautifully with WooCommerce, MemberPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress.

NOTE: We’ll soon be adding a comprehensive guide for using MemberPress, LearnDash, BuddyPress and bbPress in concert. – April 2018.

16. Forums. BuddyPress & bbPress.

Both the MemberPress and LearnDash are built to work and play well with WordPress’s most popular Group and Forums plugins: BuddyPress and bbPress. Install both, as well as the additional plugins recommended in the Action Checklist below.

NOTE: We’ll soon be adding a comprehensive guide for using MemberPress, LearnDash, BuddyPress and bbPress in concert. – April 2018.

17. Video. Vimeo for Embedded Videos.

If you are planning to allow anyone and everyone to see your video content, then simply upload your videos to your YouTube account and use this plugin to embed them in your WordPress site.

If you’d like to offer some of your videos to members only, then set up a Vimeo Plus account. For $5 a month, they will allow you to embed your videos privately on your site (or any other domain you choose) and limit the ability of users to share said videos.

18. Security. WordFence.

Now that we’ve installed the bulk of our plugins and made sure they’re functioning correctly, go ahead and install the free Wordfence security plugin. Sign up for automatic updates and emails. It will let you know any time there is a suspicious login attempt and/or potential attack.

19. Cost. Less than your annual phone bill.

Ok.

20. Resource List. Recommended items in convenient checklist format.

Ok.