How to Build an Artist Website Without Writing Code
Describe the work, the series, and what you want a visitor to do, then let an AI builder generate the site and edit until it disappears behind the paintings. On Zugo a single-page artist site is a build of about a minute, and a version with individual work pages is a multi-page build starting at 12 credits.
An artist's website has an unusual requirement: the design has to be good enough to be credible and quiet enough to be invisible. Most generated sites fail the second test, and this guide is largely about how to ask for the quiet version.
What does an artist's website actually need to do?
Three audiences arrive, and they want different things. A collector wants to know what is available and what it costs. A gallery or curator wants the CV, the statement, and the coherence of a body of work. A commissioner wants to know whether you take commissions and how that works.
A site that serves all three is not complicated, it is just ordered. Work first, statement second, CV third, contact last. The most common mistake is leading with an artist statement, which is the thing a collector reads last and a curator reads only after the work has interested them.
The second most common mistake is a single undifferentiated gallery. Work grouped into series, with a date range and a sentence, reads as a practice. The same images in one grid read as an archive.
The site also has a quieter job: being the address you can give anyone. A studio visit, an open call, a curator who saw one piece somewhere. A single link that shows the body of work and how to reach you is worth more than any individual feature you might add to it.
How should the work be catalogued?
Like a gallery would, because the fields a gallery uses exist for reasons a collector recognises. Missing fields read as an amateur listing even when the painting is excellent.
| Field | Why it belongs | What happens without it |
|---|---|---|
| Title | Identifies the work | Enquiries say "the blue one" |
| Year | Places it in your development | Everything looks like it happened at once |
| Medium and support | Sets expectations of surface and value | Buyers assume the cheapest option |
| Dimensions | The single most-asked question | An email thread before any real interest |
| Availability | Available, sold, in a collection | Sold work generates dead enquiries |
| Price or "price on request" | Filters the enquiry | Silence reads as unaffordable |
| Series | Shows the work is thought, not output | A grid of unrelated images |
Marking sold work as sold rather than removing it is worth doing. A page of sold pieces is evidence that people buy your work, which is the exact reassurance a first-time buyer is looking for.
What should the prompt say?
Name the medium, the series, the structure, and the restraint. An unguided generator makes a marketing site, and a marketing site around paintings looks like a poster shop.
Build a website for a painter working in oil on linen, with three
series made between 2021 and 2026.
Pages:
1. Home: one full-width work image, name, one line, links to the three
series.
2. Series page template: a short paragraph and the works in the series
in a simple grid.
3. Work page template: large image, then title, year, medium,
dimensions, availability, and price or price on request.
4. About: statement of no more than 200 words, CV with exhibitions,
education, and collections.
5. Contact: form for enquiries with the work title prefilled where
possible.
Style: white background, one small typeface, wide margins, no shadows,
no animation, images at the largest size the page allows.
The style line is the important one. "No shadows, no animation" and "one small typeface" are the difference between a site that frames the work and a site that competes with it. It costs one sentence to ask and several edits to fix afterwards.
If describing structure is not how you want to start, Zugo ships 25 templates, and forking a restrained portfolio layout makes your first move replacing content rather than specifying a grid. The general approach is covered in the portfolio site guide.
Should you sell directly from the site?
Sometimes, and the answer depends entirely on what you sell. There are three honest positions and they need different builds.
Originals, gallery represented. Do not put a cart on the site. List availability and price on request, route enquiries to your gallery, and keep the site a catalogue. Adding checkout here can complicate your gallery relationship for no gain.
Originals, unrepresented. A price and an enquiry form is usually enough. Shipping a stretched canvas is a conversation, not a checkout, and a form gives you the chance to have it.
Prints, cards, or small editions. This is where checkout genuinely helps, because the transaction is standard and the volume justifies automation. Connect Stripe and the site takes payments and subscriptions directly. Our payments guide covers the setup, and the online store walkthrough covers the shape of a product catalogue.
The mistake to avoid is building a full shop before you have anything to sell in volume. A catalogue with an enquiry form converts fine and takes an evening; a shop takes longer and needs stock, shipping rules, and tax decisions behind it.
How do you handle images of the work?
This is the part that decides whether the site is any good, and it is mostly not a design question.
Photograph flat work evenly lit, square to the camera, with the colour corrected against the actual painting. A phone photo taken at an angle in a warm room undoes any amount of good layout. This is the highest-value hour in the whole project.
Then resize before uploading. A page carrying twelve untouched exports is slow, and slow is where visitors leave. Resizing the long edge to a sensible width keeps the image sharp on screen and makes the page usable on a phone, which is where a large share of your visitors will be. You can use your own images throughout without restriction.
On watermarks: a heavy watermark protects a low-resolution image nobody wanted to steal and ruins the impression for the collector you did want. A modest resolution limit does more good than a diagonal signature across the work.
What does it cost and how long does it take?
Pricing is per action. A single-page site is 6 credits. A multi-page build is 12 credits for the first three pages plus 3 for each page after, and every edit is 3 credits.
A site with a home page, three series pages, an about page, and a contact page is 12 plus three extra pages, or 21 credits before edits. Free comes with 5 credits, Pro is $25 a month for 200 credits, and Business is $99 a month.
If you add work regularly, the cheaper structure is a Supabase table holding the catalogue, so a new painting is a row rather than a page build. That takes a one-time setup and then removes the builder from your publishing routine entirely.
Generation is about a minute for a single page and a few minutes for a multi-page site. Every build is booted in a sandbox before it reaches you, and a build that fails to open is reported as a failure rather than handed over as a blank page. That lowers the risk of publishing something dead; it does not check that your dimensions are right.
Where does an AI builder stop for an artist?
Four limits worth knowing before you start.
It does not fix the photography. No builder improves a badly lit, colour-shifted photograph of a painting, and the site is only as good as those files.
It is not an inventory system. Editions, certificates, consignment records, and gallery splits belong in a spreadsheet or a dedicated tool. The site can show availability; it should not be your ledger.
Unusual presentation takes iteration. A zoom-on-detail viewer, a custom lightbox, or an installation-view comparison arrives through several edits rather than one prompt.
Complex products need a team. Zugo does not replace a development team once a project grows into a real application. When it does, GitHub export gives you an ordinary repository, and the project belongs to you.
For the job most artists actually have, a credible catalogue online this week with enquiries reaching your inbox, none of that gets in the way. Photograph your best six works properly first, write two sentences about each series, and describe the site around them at zugo.dev.