While looking through artist's online portfolio websites of some of the members of Artist Run Website I have come across many different ways that artists handle organizing their content. Here at Artist Run Website we aim for simplicity paired with visual elegance which is why you will find a menu that is two levels deep instead of a zillion (sure it's a number : ). You might be all-to-familiar with websites that have menus that are 4 or 5 levels deep and they may work for some websites but when you are presenting visual work such as your art people don't want to have to keep digging through levels of navigation - they just want to start being blown away by your paintings!

When you have a two level menu for organizing your content you can get creative with how you blend your written and image content. I have just updated my site and you can see above how I generally organize my content. For example, in the first menu you can select PAINTINGS and then a secondary menu where you can select from different painting series like Antarticus, Eerie Dearies etcetera.This is pretty straightforward but it leaves room for me to add other mediums like Sculpture or Printmaking without losing clarity.

One tip I can offer you is to place additional written content about each painting series under your ABOUT section, see below. 

Even though this is the about section you can still add a few images to spice it up or lead into the text that people are about to read. For my About Eerie Dearies ABC Book I started with an image of the book cover before getting into my description of the project.

Storing written content about each series under ABOUT was great and helped keep things organized, my thought was that people would go to the ABOUT area when they were ready to read vs. peruse the eye-candy! 

However I wanted to have some written content blended in with the visual art content as well so I borrowed a technique from some of the other Artist Run Website users. They had added an image to each painting series that contained text. You could use photoshop to do this or any image software that let's you use text. As I have mentioned before I love PicMonkey, so I used that. 

Here is what I created: 

So once you scroll through all of my images in the Eerie Dearies Series you get this image with a little blurb about the work. I will keep the denser information in the ABOUT section but I think this added blurb within scrolling through the images is great for those who just want a little insight but don't feel like reading an essay about it! It's like I am tricking people into learning a bit more about my work ....Mwuhahahah! (evil laugh).

Just kidding! But if you want to check it out, sample it live on my website here: www.thechaperon.ca  you can decide if it works for you. Also you'll see that I have place my blurb at the end of scrolling through the Eerie Dearies images. This is because I wanted to get people to the art asap but you may decide to put your blurb at the beginning or you could put it somewhere in the middle.

Have fun tweaking your websites!