image by cambodia4kids
If you have a website and a blog as two separate places online, you may be wasting a lot of valuable opportunities.
Easy blogging services like Blogger have done a great job of encouraging thousands of people to start their own blogs. Artists who don’t know better will pay to have some sort of templated website created, then they’ll start a Blogger page for their blog. This is an easy solution to hit blogging on your art marketing check-off list.
The problem with this approach is that you’re going to get the most visitors on your blog, not your website. Why? Because your blog will have tons of writing about your art, with constantly updated new content. In addition, the comments will generate more new content and discussion, which encourages more people to come back to your blog over and over. While this is great for your blog, it generally means that your art gets ignored because it’s not right there along with all of your content.
Your blog and your website should be one and the same, both visually, and on the back end (they should live on the same server in the same directory). This helps not only your visitors, but also the search engines like Google. This can easily be accomplished with tools like WordPress. There are other options out there, but for the purpose of this post, we’ll just discuss WordPress. If you are using a different solution for your artist website and want to know how to merge your blog and website, then leave a comment below and we’ll see if we can help you.
An Art Blog and Artist Website on the Same Site
A self-hosted WordPress installation can easily be configured to look like a full-on website and not just a blog. Simply go to Settings > Reading and then select Front Page Displays > A Static Page. There, you can choose a single page that you create, and that will be the home page for your site. Then you can make your blog posts appear on a different page (I recommend creating a page called Blog and pointing them there). It’s that easy to create an artist website with WordPress.
If you have a standalone blog that you’d like to merge with your website, there are a couple of tutorials that will show you how to merge your other blog into WordPress.
Problogger has a great post on migrating a WordPress.com site to a self-hosted WordPress.org installation.
Digital Inspiration has a tutoriall on how to move from Blogger to WordPress.
Merging Art Blog & Art Website = Overwhelm
Don’t let yourself get overwhelmed by all of this technology. There are tons of tutorials out there to learn how to do these sorts of things. In fact, in the very near future I’ll be creating an online community for artists who want to get serious about learning their online marketing. I firmly believe that the Web is the future for artists and for the art world. If you’d like to get a sneak peek at that community, you’ll want to make sure you are on the mailing list.
I just moved my blog from blogger to my website–and the move was mostly easy. Especially once I learned that in the cPanel of my hosting site (and apparently on most hosts that use cPanel) was a folder called Fantastico that walked me through setting up WP. Then I used the import button on WP to move my archives over from Blogger.
Now the only issue is that my blog looks better than the rest of my site–so I’m working on that.
I use WordPress and element can I still merge the blog and website together.
I had a blogger blog and a separate static website awhile back. Just as you described, I found that the blog got all the traffic. I did as you recommend–created a website around my blog via self-hosted WordPress. It is inexpensive, gets more traffic, is easier to manage, and has become a hub of activity. Plus, I like the look of it. I recommend the idea to anyone!
Its easy…have a blog on your artist website. It enables you & gives the unique space to tell the world about you and your art process…see mine @ meltemi art and a stand-alone blog @http://meltemispage.blogspot.com/2010/05/success-as-artist-would-be.html
Here I can say things that I do not necessarily want to associate with my art-business…
Just what I needed to read! I currently have a website and a Typepad blog and the idea of merging them has been on the back burner. WordPress may be the answer. Thanks.
I was going to try and move my blog from blogger to wordpress, but got overwhelmed. Then I discovered that you can make “pages” in blogger and have it act more like a website, so that’s what I am doing for now. I can update it easily myself, and it’s all there. I may upgrade to wordpress in the future, but for now, this is easy and free.
I’ve taken this to heart and am in the process of building a combined art blog and sale site, but using Joomla. I’m lucky in that a neighbour is a Joomla developer so get a lot of support from him. It’s been ‘interesting’ but well worth the effort. The web site currently linked uses a pre-defined template, but soon I will switch the redirection to point to the new site. I think showing your own domain name is much more professional looking than having a sub-domain on sites like Etsy.
Hi & thx for your post. I use SiteWelder for my website (and I love them for the real person help they give me), and Blogger for my blog (http://whitneypeckman.blogspot.com). At this time SiteWelder is not able to put my blog on my site. I’m wondering if there is another way to handle this?
Whitney, this is exactly why I tell artists not to rely on artist website templates. They’re inflexible and amateurish. I’d recommend having a professionally built site. It’ll be a hefty up front cost, but worth it in the long run.
I like the idea of a blog merged with my site which has recently been revised using Adobe Dreamweaver CS5. Can this be done with this setup?
Hi Michael. Absolutely. I would recommend adding WordPress as a subfolder of your site (site.com/blog) and running the blog that way. If you need help figuring out how to set up and run WordPress, there’s a full course inside the Abundant Artist Community.
This is great advice–I have a WordPress site that I created, with my blog folded into it. When people visit the blog, they often browse around and look at my art too (I can tell by the Site Stats that I’ve set up through WP).
Thank you for this post! I have a very active blog and a website to promote my writing–and the blog gets lots of hits, the website not so much. I googled “should I combine my blog with my website” and here were your wise words to help me. 🙂
Hi
I have a blogger blog and am setting up a website (free) via Wix.com. Can I merge the two or would a link to the website from the blog suffice?
Alternatively, would it be easier to just transfer to wordpress…and how would I do this?
Kind regards
Ken
I have a website at wix.com and a blog at wordpress.com. Wix offers a blog function on my website so I double post to wordpress.com and my wix blog. I send emails out to my list to notify them of my new blogs. I don’t want to redesign another web to move it to wordpress.org so this seems to be the best solution for now. Any suggestions are welcome.