Your name is your address: domain names for artists

Your domain name is the only part of your online presence that nobody can take away from you, reorder, or quietly demote. It is also the part most artists put off longest, usually because the name they wanted was gone and they never picked a second choice.

It is worth an hour of thought. The address you choose is going on business cards, wall labels, show catalogues and the back of every piece of work you sell, and moving it later means all of those are wrong.

Why your own domain, rather than a free address

• It is permanent. You can change your website, your host, your whole platform, and the address stays the same. Every card you have handed out still works.
• It reads as professional. A gallerist who sees a free subdomain or a link-farm page makes an assumption about how long you intend to keep doing this. Fair or not, they make it.
• You can have email at it. hello@yourname.com is a different kind of message from yourname1987@gmail.com.
• It is the thing that gets printed. Labels, cards, catalogues, the sign at your booth. Print is unforgiving about changes.

Choosing the name

Start with yourfullname.com. It is the thing people will type, it matches the name you sign work with, and it is what a curator searches after meeting you. If it is taken, in rough order of preference:

1. Add what you do: yournameart.com, yournamestudio.com, yournamefineart.com.
2. Add a middle initial, if that is how you sign.
3. Use a different ending: .art, .studio and .gallery all read fine for an artist. .com is still what people assume, so if you take another ending, expect to say it out loud more often.

Apply the phone test: say it to someone and have them type it without help. Hyphens fail this test. So do numbers, deliberate misspellings, and words that sound the same as other words.

Your name, or a studio name?

If you are building a career as an artist, use your name. Galleries, jurors and collectors search for people, and a studio name means building recognition for two things instead of one. Studio names make sense when the business is genuinely bigger than you — a shared workshop, a production practice, a shop with several makers.

If your name is about to change

Pick the name you intend to sign work with for the next twenty years and register that. A signature on a canvas outlasts most other decisions, and your domain should match it.

The honest part: the traps

• Renewals. A domain is rented by the year. Miss the renewal and you can lose it, along with every card and label pointing at it. Turn on auto-renew and keep the card on it current. This is the single most common way artists lose an address they have used for a decade.
• Ownership. If a friend, a web designer or an agency registers it "for you" in their own account, it is theirs. Register it yourself, in your own name, with your own email on the account.
• Transfers are slow on purpose. Under ICANN's Transfer Policy, a registrar may refuse a transfer that is "requested within 60 days of the creation date," and a change of the registered owner currently triggers a 60-day transfer lock of its own. So a domain you just bought or just had put in your name cannot move to another registrar straight away. Plan around it rather than being surprised by it at a deadline.
• A domain is not a website. Buying it is the cheap part. It points at nothing until something is built there.
• You do not need five of them. Buying every variant and ending is money spent on nothing. One good one, kept forever, beats six you renew out of anxiety.

A short checklist

1. Register it in your own name, with your own email on the account.
2. Turn on auto-renew, and keep the payment card current.
3. Turn on privacy protection so your home address is not in a public record.
4. Make sure the site is served over HTTPS — a browser warning on your own name is a bad first impression.
5. Put it everywhere: your email signature, your labels, your cards, and the link field of every profile you have — Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn all give you one.
6. If you ever change a page's address, set up a redirect from the old one. Old links live a long time.

Common mistakes

• Letting the renewal lapse, then finding the name has been bought by someone else.
• Letting a designer own it.
• Using a free platform subdomain for years and then discovering everything you printed points at a service you want to leave.
• Choosing a clever name nobody can spell after hearing it.
• Registering a studio name, then spending years explaining that it is you.

How Art Easely helps

Domains are under Website → Domain, and there are three routes, depending on where you are starting:

• Search and buy one without leaving the portal. It is registered to you and connected to your site automatically, so there is no DNS afternoon.
• Connect one you already own. You keep it where it is registered and point it here; the DNS records you need are shown on the page.
• Transfer one in, if you would rather everything lived in one account.

The SSL certificate is included and renews itself on every paid plan, and Website → Redirects is where you send an old page address to a new one so links in old emails and catalogues keep working. Before you have a domain, your site runs at yourname.arteasely.com, which is fine to start with — just do not print it.

Next: what belongs on the site once the address is sorted, and how people find it.