Welcome to the Art Storefronts success coaching video series. In this video, we’ll be focusing on home page optimization, specifically for fine art and photo printing companies who offer upload to print right on their website. Here we’ll be working with the Unlimited Art Project, a fine art printing company out of Miami, Florida.

Okay, so the first thing’s first. We’re gonna just go straight down the page.

So the first thing I see here is you have Home, Shop Art, and the Upload & Order. And so I’m wondering what is the higher priority? Are you trying to sell art primarily, or are you trying to get people to upload and order? It looks like everything is driven towards upload and ordering going down, except you have a little bit of art selling categories.

If your focus is on selling prints, then your Upload & Order should come first. Your Shop Art should come after that. In addition, you’re missing some information and some pages that are common with fine art and photo printing companies. Having a link that says Products, with a drop down menu, and where people can see what types of media you offer, like canvas, fine art paper, photo paper, having detailed pictures of each of them, showing the front, the back, the side, showing the different sizes you offer, and the pricing.

You don’t need to show every single size you offer, but a basic table that shows the typical sizes and the prices for each of the products, and the different finishing options, is really helpful because asking people to upload an image when they have no commitment yet and they have no idea what your pricing is is not going to create a lot of conversions. There will be people that just simply leave because before they wanna go through the hassle of uploading an image, they wanna know what you charge and if you’re in their ballpark.

They also wanna know if you have the products that they want. Is your canvas archival, is it going to last? What kind of inks are you using? what types of papers are you using? What types of canvas?

And so all of this information will assuage the concerns of the typical professional artist or photographer that is considering placing an order right now on the spot. So make sure you have that up here. And you may wanna have the products first, and then Upload & Order because that’s a logical way of doing it. Another thing that many of our customers have that have high conversion rates is just a pricing page that just has all of the prices for everything. But you can figure out how you wanna go ahead and do that. You should have someplace where people can easily see the products that you’re offering, and it should be very clear in this navigation menu.

Now, if I look at this slideshow here, and I go back to the first image, you’re saying “shop our gallery” and so you’re clearly advocating the gallery first.

This is going to have a significant impact on your upload to print conversions. You don’t look like a typical upload to print site, or a fine art printing company who really focuses and cares on fine art printing. You’re coming across more as a gallery first. If that’s your intention, maybe that’s what you wanna do. It’s gonna hurt your upload to print, period. And then on your other images, you just have take your picture, create an art piece. There’s no call to action button on here. This is really driven towards, it looks like an image that’s driven towards consumers, you’re showing an iPhone, and so if I’m a professional artist or photographer, which it seems like you want because you’re a quality outfit here, and you talk about quality and fine art products, and stuff like that, that’s not going to appeal to a professional artist or photographer. That’s probably gonna turn them away. Thirdly, let’s look at this image.

Busy creating, let us take care of your, all of this stuff. Okay, that’s fine. I don’t know who you’re trying to speak to yet. Are you trying to attract professional artists or photographers who have a lot of orders? Clearly you are, that’s not very clear. And then you also don’t have a call to action here to learn more about what you can do for them. There should always be a button on every one of these images. I can see you’re linking this image, but if you just add a button somewhere, it makes someone go, “okay, I wanna read more about that.” And if we look at your last image here, Unleash your creativity to make money, we deal with all this stuff.

If this is the, you seem to be talking about we deal with the order process a lot. If that’s the main pain point that artists and photographers have, that’s news to us. That’s not typically what we see promoted on a fine art printing and photo site as the very first thing, especially twice. You do have a professional camera there at least, and maybe that belongs in the beginning of the slideshow. And again, there’s no call to action here. Where do I go to learn more? Where do I go to get started if I’m ready to go?

And so, you know, this slideshow is taking up a lot of space here. These images should probably just be little, about you know, half the size, or half the height, that is, so that as your page loads, you can scroll down a little bit and you start seeing some other text and more information and buttons and links to get more information. Now, your content area. Your content area here, you just have, “Welcome to the Unlimited Art Project” and you just talk about, it’s our most anticipated chapter at Portfolio Art Factory. If I’m a new customer, and I just found you off of Google, I don’t know who Portfolio Art Factory is.

I have no idea. “Manufacturer and distributor of quality fine art products and reproduction wall decor.” Do you provide printing services? Do you provide printing services for artists or photographers? I can’t tell whether you’re for me or not. We need to do a big upgrade in this section to talk about, or talk to the customers you’re trying to attract. If you want people to buy prints, then you need to speak to them, you need to give them buttons that tell them where to learn more about your products, which is the link that I recommended in your navigation menu. But you should have another one down here. You should another button that talks about, learn more about our fine art printing expertise. You know, you need to speak to these people. So we’ve gone from a slideshow that shows people with iPhones, and now we’ve gone down here and we’re talking about manufacturer and distributor of fine art quality products and reproduction wall decor.

It sounds like you’re speaking to a wholesale company or maybe hospitality projects. So there’s a lot of discontinuity between what you’re advocating. And what this means is that when people come to this site, they’re trying to figure out, is your business right for me? And it’s very difficult to figure that out right now, and it’s gonna be very difficult to get these people to move forward and upload an image, and get them to add something to their shopping cart and checkout. And so this may be part of the reason why, when we look at your data, we’re seeing a lack of add to cart conversions and a lack of checkout conversions. This lack of add to cart conversion is very telling. Because that simply means that people are not uploading images and just adding them to their shopping cart when they reach the buying page. It means that you’ve got a lot of work to do here to get people to actually connect with your business, feel committed, feel ready to go, they’re ready to upload an image, and they’re ready to purchase.

And all of these things are probably leading to a lot of confusion, and they need to be resolved. Now the last thing I see here is your top selling categories, your art. So again, right now, Shop Art is your first link, but then it’s at the very bottom of your page. So I’m even more confused about what type of business you’re trying to be. Are you focused on fine art print making and providing high quality prints and service to artists and photographers? Or are you trying to sell art?

It’s a very very confusing thing. Here at Art Storefronts, we are not fans necessarily of grouping a gallery site into a printing site. And this is because of a lot of the data that we have seen over the years now. The problem with that is, if you want a website to rank well for fine art printing, and for fine art giclee printing, or photo printing, then it is best to have a website dedicated to that topic. As soon as you try to add a gallery in here, you’re diluting the fine art printing website in the eyes of Google and other search engines.

So you’re always gonna be at a disadvantage, in terms of ranking the fine art printing website, because you are trying to sell art on it and it’s a gallery site. You’re actually confusing Google. And so, the best thing to do is to separate these onto different sites. You can have a child site with your art gallery, and have your main site as a fine art printing company. There’s other reasons for this too.

Because when visitors come from Google or anywhere else, and they come to the site, as we mentioned earlier, you’re going to have higher conversion rates if your entire site, and especially your homepage, is just dedicated to everything that you do with fine art printing and for artists and photographers and for people who want to buy fine art prints.

Likewise, on a gallery site, when you have a dedicated gallery site, you have a site that is completely dedicated to selling art. It takes on the look and feel of a gallery site. There’s no confusion. And so, when visitors come to each of those sites, they believe that they have reached the site that is right for them. Right now, when people see a mixture of sites, or just in general, what they typically do is they hit the back button, they go back to a Google search, or wherever they came from, and they start looking for somebody who actually looks to meet their needs better.

So websites that are dedicated to a specific topic, and they aren’t diluted, are going to have higher conversion rates, and they’re going to get better rankings from Google. So there’s a major argument to remove this, and have a child site that is dedicated with just an art gallery on it. And you can certainly link to that site in your navigation here, there’s nothing wrong with that.

Maybe you have Shop Art over here, but removing this from the homepage and having a separate site with it, is the way that you wanna go about it. So there’s something to reiterate here. There’s nothing wrong with having a gallery on your fine art printing site, but it shouldn’t be the main focus on your homepage, or anywhere else really. It should just be somewhere in your navigation where you list all of the artists that you work for, and you have a small gallery on your site.

But, with that gallery, I wouldn’t expect to sell much art. You’re not gonna get that good SEO, you’re not gonna get a lot of traffic. You’re gonna get a lot of bounces on your website because if your site is dedicated to fine art printing, then people who are looking to shop art are gonna land on your site, they’re gonna immediately leave because it doesn’t look like an art selling website, and there are plenty of art selling websites out there that they would rather work with and buy from. Because they are actually focused on the topic. Another point to make is that child gallery sites have proven to be a very very powerful referral source to drive more upload to print business for a fine art printing and photo printing company.

The two feed each other. Let us show you what we mean. You’ll notice we’re looking at some data here from Skyline Art Prints, which is a fine art printing company in Austin, Texas. They also have Skyline Art Editions, which is a separate gallery site. And if you look here, you can see that Skyline Art Editions is referring hundreds of people to the fine art printing site. This is the data of the actual fine art printing site. And so you can see, it’s actually the third highest source of traffic for Skyline Art Prints.

And you can see here too, it’s actually converted, alright, so people are leaving, they’re going from the Skyline Art Editions site, and they’re coming to Skyline Art Prints. Why is this happening? It’s because artists and photographers are looking for places to sell their art. And when they find your gallery site, because it ranks well with SEO, and it looks good and it looks like a site really dedicated to that topic, if you have a link on that site, telling people to go back to your upload to print site, or your fine art printing site, if they wanna buy prints, then you’re going to get these artists and photographers to go back to your site and actually upload and place orders.

The data right here shows that it’s a very powerful and effective tool for doing this. Okay, so that’s it. Let’s go over the key takeaways. First, determine what type of website this is going to be. Is it a fine art printing site, or is it a gallery site? Dedicate your homepage to that topic. Next, make sure your slideshow and your page content speaks directly to the type of customers that you are trying to attract. And last, consider separating your art gallery content onto a separate site in order to maximize conversion rates, and SEO traffic on both sites, by having two websites that are completely dedicated to their own topic.

But by doing all of these things, you’ll be speaking more directly to your target customer, and as a result, you should start seeing higher add to cart, and higher checkout conversion rates that are more consistent with the fine art and photo printing companies that we have on the Art Storefronts platform and that have been documented in other videos. Thanks again for watching, and we’ll see you in the next video.