Are you an artist, an art gallery owner, an author, musician, or actor who wants to maintain your own website? Have you thought about creating a WordPress website because you heard how awesome WordPress is?
Are you a WordPress site creator who knows that WordPress is the best way for artists and curators to be able to manage their own sites?
It’s true. WordPress is awesome for artists and people curating creative works. It’s the most powerful, most easy, and most extensible content management system around. There’s no better way to showcase your work or the work of a group of creatives.
However, if you haven’t created a website on WordPress before, having the freedom to choose from hundreds of awesome themes is daunting. Having the ability to install features easily, picking the best from thousands of different WordPress plugins, leaves a site owner with lots of different options to choose. Which do you pick? What makes YOUR job building a site to showcase creative works most straightforward?
Once you install WordPress you’re faced with a blank slate, what do you do next? How do you create pages for art? How do you create pages for artists? There’s a lot of different ways you can approach this, but using WordPress out-of-the-box, it’s not straightforward. Do you use Posts and Categories? Do you use the Parent-Child relationships between Pages? You could do it a lot of different ways, and you might get different advice from different people. In a lot of ways it might feel like forcing a square peg in a round hole. Artists, curators and creative people have been forced to package their work in awkward ways and needed a better, more elegant way to tie artist and artwork pages together.
If you want to make the process of building a WordPress website easy, and need an effective way to showcase your work, there’s no easier, more straightforward, more effective solution than ART GALLERY PLUGIN for WordPress.
Art Gallery Plugin works in several ways:
First, it makes it clear how to define web pages for artists.
Second, it makes it clear how to define web pages for works created by artists.
Third, it makes both kinds of pages display the information added to them in a manner that’s most easily understood by artificial intelligence. Today, the most important artificial intelligence online is the Google Search Engine. The best way to get Google to understand who works were created by is to use structured data, a system of unambiguously publishing information according to the standards of Schema.org.
Fourth, it makes displaying artists and art work easy through intelligent shortcodes. You can display lists of artists in many ways and you can display lists of works in many ways: by date, by title, by category of artist with several artists together, or you can segregate the works by artist.
Art Gallery Plugin publishes information entered on artist’s pages and art work’s pages using the Schema.org specifications for PERSON and CREATIVE WORK, respectively. The WordPress user becomes a curator in possession of the highest technology means to express information to Google. When information about artists and their work is recorded in ART GALLERY PLUGIN, Google understands it clearly.
Making Google understand artist and art work information doesn’t just help the pages get indexed and rank better, when this information is packaged inside pages created by ART GALLERY PLUGIN it meets the requirements for what Google calls a Knowledge Panel.
In order to know how to put together a Knowledge Panel for an artist, Google looks for information published using structured data. ART GALLERY PLUGIN asks artists for the specific kind of information Google is looking for and then publishes that information using structured data. It does this for both artist pages and art work pages.
ART GALLERY PLUGIN isn’t alone when it comes to showcasing art using structured data. Famous museums also use structured data when it comes to publishing web pages dedicated to works of art. The Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and The Smithsonian also “mark up” webpage information with the same kind of structured data this plugin supports.
It’s not just for visual artists. It covers work created by: Painters, Sculptors, Ceramicists, Muralists, Sketch Artists, Photographers, Costume Designers, Garment Designers, Cosmetologists, Makeup Artists, Hair Designers, Graphic Designers, Graphic Novelists, Musicians, Lyricists, Publishers, Authors, Course Creators, Thesis Authors, Comic Book Creators, Prosthetic Designers, Genetic Engineers, Television Producers, Breeders, Map Makers, Videographers, Motion Picture Artists, Actors, Voice Artists, Performers, Speakers, Comedians, Legislators, Play Writes, Game Designers, Video Game Creators, 3D Modelers, Lifeform Creators, Artificial Intelligence Engineers, Programmers and Meme Makers.
A single work of art is often created by multiple people, contributing in different ways, for example in a comic book. This plugin allows a single work of art to reference the multiple roles involved, not just the primary artist. It even allows referencing a sponsor or a funder, someone who paid for a work of art, not just the artist who got their hands dirty.
Instead of adding this functionality to a specific theme, Massive Impressions Online Marketing, the company that publishes it, put it into a plugin. This plugin is compatible with some of the most popular WordPress themes and plugins. Artists and creative people do not like to have their creativity limited. Nor do they want to “look like everyone else”. This makes “art themes” less than appealing to many artists. What they want instead is a powerful tool. So the choice to put the functionality in a plugin rather than a theme was obvious.
So how does this work? What makes it easy? This plugin creates two new types of objects, Custom Post Types, in WordPress: Artists and ArtWork. There’s a section added in the Edit Windows for each of these. Fields that allow defining specific kinds of data, for example a date field for an artist’s birthday, make sure curators are entering the right kind of values.
Can non-technical artists and curators curate a lot of work easily using it?
Making a tool powerful means making it both easy to use and obvious to figure out. This plugin meets the requirements for ease of use, easily. Artists who’ve adopted it in their sites required little training on how to use it. Shortly after learning what to do with it, one artist in his seventies created almost two hundred pages, one for each work, in less than two months. So yeah, it’s easy and straightforward to use.
How can you get Art Gallery Plugin?
Massive Impressions is the company that publishes ART GALLERY PLUGIN. You can download and license it at shop.massiveimpressions.com. There’s several ways you can secure your site’s copy: year by year, in a multi-site developer agreement and with a lifetime license. Get yours today!