What galleries and jurors look for on your website

A gallery director opens your website with a coffee in one hand and forty other tabs open. A juror is on submission number eighty-three. Neither is reading. They are scanning, and they are looking for reasons to stop.

Knowing what that scan consists of is useful, because almost all of it is fixable in an afternoon.

The first ten seconds: the images

Before anything else, they look at photographs of your work. Not your design, not your statement. If the images are dim, shot at an angle, colour-shifted under tungsten light, or cropped so the edge of the canvas is missing, the scan ends there — and it ends there whether or not the paintings are good, because what is on screen is the photograph, not the painting.

Shoot square-on in even daylight, crop to the edge, and keep colour true to the piece. This matters more than any other item on this page.

The next twenty: is this a body of work?

They are asking whether the pieces belong together and whether you are still making them. Carolyn Edlund, an art business writer who also juries shows, describes both halves of that: "I also want to see if the work is recent. It is important that an artist is growing and evolving," and on cohesion, "each piece should relate to the others."

Three unrelated series on one page reads as indecision, not range. Put your strongest, most recent, most coherent group first, and give it its own page.

Then: the CV

The CV is read for trajectory, not for length. Edlund again: "I look at the CV to see how long they have been showing their work. Experience does sway the jury." Erica Berkowitz, co-owner of Haven Gallery, lists the same thing among what she wants to find on a site: recent body of work, relevant links, and C.V.

A short honest CV is fine. A padded one is not — group shows listed as solo shows, a "collection" that is your aunt's hallway, and workshops dressed up as residencies are all recognisable to someone who reads dozens of these a month.

Then: the work's details, and yours

Title, year, medium, dimensions. A serious viewer is trying to picture the piece on a wall and to know when you made it. Missing dimensions are the most common gap on artist sites, and the most irritating.

Then: can they reach you? A working contact form or address, on a page they do not have to hunt for.

The honest part: a website does not get you a gallery

Representation comes from relationships, fit, timing, and showing up — being in the right group shows, being introduced, being someone a dealer has met twice. No website has ever produced that on its own.

Assume they will look at your Instagram too, and that it tells them whether you are working now. The website is the considered version; the feed is the evidence of a practice in motion.

What a good site does is stop you being ruled out. It is the thing that turns "I met someone at the opening" into "I looked her up and the work is strong and she has been showing for six years." That is a smaller claim than the one most website marketing makes, and it is the true one.

One more thing galleries genuinely care about: price consistency. If a dealer finds the same size and body of work selling for less on your own site than on their wall, that is a real problem and it will cost you the relationship. Keep your prices the same everywhere, whoever is selling.

A check before you submit anything

1. Open your site on a phone. Does a painting appear within three seconds?
2. Is the first body of work the one you want to be judged on, and is it recent?
3. Does every piece show title, year, medium and dimensions?
4. Is your CV current, dated, and honest about what each entry was?
5. Is your statement one page and readable out loud?
6. Does your contact form actually deliver? Send yourself a test.
7. Is there anything on the site that says "coming soon"? Delete it.
8. Do your prices match what your gallery is asking?

Common mistakes

• Leading with a 2019 series because it is the one with the best photographs.
• A CV as a downloadable PDF only. Put it on a page; nobody downloads.
• Statement written in art-speak that says nothing a stranger can hold on to.
• Sold work shown with no indication that it is sold, so the strongest pieces look available.
• Different prices on the site and in the gallery.
• An enquiry form that has never been tested.

How Art Easely helps

• The catalogue holds the details reviewers look for — title, year, medium, dimensions, framed dimensions, edition, price, availability and where the piece currently is — and the website reads them from there, so a piece cannot appear on your site missing its size.
• The CV builder keeps entries by category and date, and you choose which show on the site. Updating after a show takes a minute instead of finding the old document.
• Bio and statement live in the same place as the work and go onto the site's Bio sections, with an assistant to help you draft if the blank page is the problem.
• Submissions, under Artwork, keeps track of what you have entered where, so you are not reconstructing a call-for-entry history at deadline time.
• Price lists generate from the catalogue, which is how you keep one price per piece across your site, your gallery and a fair.
• Artwork Labels and certificates of authenticity come from the same record, so the wall label, the certificate and the website agree.

Worth reading next: what belongs on the site and what a website is actually for.