Welcome to the Art Storefront Success Coaching Video Series. In this video, we’ll be focusing on site navigation.

The way you setup your site navigation can have a huge impact on your conversion rates and we want to setup your navigation the right way that is consistent with the leading online art retailers so that you can maximize your conversion rates, and more importantly, so that you don’t prevent conversions from happening and in this video we’ll be working with Madaras Gallery.

So the first thing we’re going to do here to provide context is let’s look at a couple of the leading online art retailers.

Let’s start with Art.com. So if we look at their navigation, notice that the very first link they have here is ‘Best-Selling Art’. OK, so when I hover ‘Best-Selling Art’, I’m immediately looking at a bunch of categories here that they’re trying to guide us to, as well as one big button that says ‘Shop All Best-Sellers’. But more importantly, they’re guiding you right into it; you can also click the link right here if you want to.

Then, the second link is subjects, right? So you’ve got all of your subject matter basically right here, as well as a link to see all of the subjects. Third is artists. If you want to look by artists, they’ve got, obviously, artists with very popular names, I can recognize pretty much everybody on here. If you’ve got artists that don’t have popular names, this will be less important.

But either way, you notice their entire strategy is to take a visitor and think about what that visitor might be looking for when they come to the site and they’re doing it in sequential order. Next thing they have is rooms– so bedroom, living room, kitchen, bathroom, nursery. Again, what is the visitor thinking when they come to the site? They’re thinking about, you know, “I’ve got to decorate my bedroom, I’ve got to decorate my nursery.” You know, they’ve even got ‘man cave’ right here, ‘inspiring spaces’.

I mean, they’re really taking a comprehensive approach at every thought a visitor might have when they come to the site, because they want to immediately lead the person there. Then they’ve got ‘product types’, ‘photos to art’, ‘shop all art’, ‘frame art’; they do a lot of things here, but the bottom line is is that their navigation is like a guiding map that will allow people to immediately find what they’re looking for based on what the visitor is thinking.

Now, another company we’ll look at here is Saatchi Art. Saatchi Art is a very popular art site for originals and limited editions and notice, immediately, the first link we have is ‘paintings’. If I hover ‘paintings’, I’ve got all of the subject matter categories, right? So it’s very easy to find what I want to by just hovering the first link. Next, ‘photography’, same thing.

If you want photography, we’re going to lead you right to all of our stuff. Then you’ve got ‘drawings’. If you want drawings, same thing– sculptures, collages, prints, they have a feature section and so forth. So everything here is guiding the visitor towards what they might want. Now going back to your site, let’s look at your navigation.

Now imagine I’m a visitor who just found you off Google, I don’t know who you are, but I’m looking for some southwestern art, but I come to your site– the first link I see ‘home’, the next link I see is about Diana Madaras and then ‘prints and canvases’, ‘original paintings’, ‘southwest gifts and cards’.

You can see here that the biggest problem is that the very first few links here need to be devoted towards what a visitor is thinking and a visitor is thinking, “I need to decorate a room,” or, “I need to decorate an office,” or, “I have a open wall space where I need to put something,” and they’re thinking in terms of space, they’re thinking in terms of subject matter and subject matter being most important because we just demonstrated that subject matter was the primary driver of the navigation on both Art.com and Saatchi Art. So instead of what you have here, you need to have some navigation elements that related to subject matter.

So what I would recommend is maybe have your very first link as ‘shop art’ and it should be a hover menu where when you hover over it, it shows all the different subject matter, such as animals or landscapes or western or whatever your categories are going to be.

And next after ‘shop art’, you might want to have ‘bestsellers’, you might want to have ‘shop by room type’ with some design ideas– there’s some different things that you could creatively do and I would look at, you know, both Art.com and Saatchi Art as inspiration. In addition, I noticed you have holiday and calendar, coffee table book, gift certificates– all of these can be grouped into one single category like ‘other products’. It makes your navigation menu really long and bulky and distracting.

Same thing goes for, you know, you’ve got ‘about’ and then you’ve got ‘bio, awards and shows’ and then you’ve got ‘events’ and ‘Madaras gallery’, ‘about the gallery’, ‘video blog’– there’s a lot of stuff here and I Don’t really understand it. So you might have just one ‘about’ link and then group ‘about Diana Madaras’ and ‘about the gallery’, you know, all of that can be under one section, under one bigger drop-down menu.

Those are pages that people are barely going to read and so to take up all this navigation and distract them from what you really want them to do, which is to get into your art and get into your galleries and start shopping; you want to make sure that you don’t have too bulky of a navigation and that’ll help you resolve that.

Now another thing I noticed here is that you’ve separated original paintings from prints and canvases. Now, this makes things a lot more difficult, particularly if your people are searching by subject matter, which they will be, and if people are interested in both. Because now you have to separate subject matter by original paintings and prints and canvases and it becomes really confusing.

And to give you an example, if we go back to Saatchi Art here, you can see for all of their images that are offered as originals, they offer originals and prints, side-by-side on the exact same page, OK? And you can choose from different things that you might want.

Now, with Art Storefronts, you can do the exact same thing. So here’s just an example site that I’m showing you and you notice now how we have this ‘buy prints’ and ‘buy original’, OK?

And you can actually, upon page load, have it default to whichever one you want, whether it’s buy original or buy prints. But you’re able to sell an original side-by-side with the wall preview tool and everything that you have here with prints.

So it’s a very convenient way to guide your visitors in by subject matter and offer them everything related to this image on the same page, whether it’s limited editions, originals, or open editions; they don’t have to search and find things, it’s all right here and what you’ll find is that people will click on ‘buy original’, they’ll look at the pricing, they’ll look at the prints, you know, they’ll be offered much more for a particular image that they like, and so the likelihood of them actually buying one or more prints is much higher than it otherwise would be.

So this user experience is dramatically better than what you’re currently doing. OK, so let’s take a quick look at how we can do that within the Art Storefront site manager.

So when you’re in the site manager and you’re editing any product within an art print store, which we can see here, you’ll notice that in the tabs there is a tab that says ‘sell as original’ and if you click this, then you can click the button ‘create original art product’ and you’ll be presented with the options that relate to the original, such as its own price and any photos that you might want to add for it.

It’s literally that simple and you’re selling originals, limited editions and open editions now side-by-side. OK, so as we can see here, there is a lot of room for improvement on the navigation menu and with the navigation menu being a critical element to guide your visitors to your art and to create conversions, this should be a high priority.

In addition, look at Art.com, look at Saatchi Art, and get inspiration for how to re-do your navigation so that it is designed for your visitor, and those are the key takeaways.

Thanks so much and we’ll see you next time.