Clean, Simple and Effective - GayLynnArt.com

I had considered featuring "the ultimate artist website" for my first Art Site of the Week.

But aside from the difficulty of finding a really great site, I also felt that it would be better to start out with a site that could be created by any artist, with some planning and work.  Rather than talking about big sites with lots of fancy technology and features, I wanted to talk about what makes a good website.

And I found a near-perfect example in  GayLynn Ribeira's site,  gaylynnart.com!

The first thing that impressed me was the home page.  It's attractive, and features strong examples of the artist's work, as well as telling visitors what the artist does:  portraits and figurative art.

The design is simple and showcases the art, rather than competing with it.

Going deeper into the site, I found even more things that impressed me: 

• Site navigation (the menu of links for moving from page to page) is consistent on every page of the site. 
• The Portraits, Drawings and Landscapes pages each display an attractive "album."  
• Clicking on the individual thumbnails brings up a "gallery" page where you can see still more paintings.  
• The gallery pages feature small thumbnail images, as well as Next and Previous links.  Each piece is shown large enough to see the detail, but small enough to load quickly, and the title and medium are shown below the large image.
• The site also includes information about the artist, and pricing and procedures for commissioning portraits.

GayLynn's site showcases her work, and doesn't get in the way of the user.  It uses some pretty basic web technology, but has the advantage of displaying correctly in all the browsers I tested.

It's a great example of what an artist's website can and should be!