What an artist website should do that Instagram cannot

Most artists asking whether they need a website are really asking a narrower question: I already post the work somewhere people see it — what would a site add?

That deserves a straight answer rather than a sales pitch. Instagram is genuinely good at several things a website will never match. It is also structurally incapable of several others. Knowing which is which is the whole decision.

Start with what Instagram does better

It is worth being honest about this, because advice that pretends otherwise is not advice.

Instagram is better at discovery. Someone who has never heard of you can encounter your work while looking at something else. A website has no such mechanism; nobody stumbles onto a domain.

It is better at immediacy. A studio photograph goes up in thirty seconds, and the work-in-progress, the half-finished canvas and the hand holding the brush all belong there in a way they rarely belong on a portfolio site.

It is better at conversation. Comments and messages create a low-friction relationship with people who follow the practice over time.

If you are not doing those things, a website will not fix it. The two are not substitutes.

Where the feed structurally fails

Now the other side — and note the word structurally. These are not things Instagram is currently bad at and might improve. They follow from what a feed is.

1. A feed has no memory

A feed is ordered by recency and tuned for engagement. Work you made three years ago is functionally unreachable, even though it may be the strongest thing you have made. There is no way for a visitor to see the 2023 series as a series.

An archive is the opposite: ordered by meaning, permanent, and browsable on the visitor’s terms. A curator who wants to see everything you have made in oil can do that in ten seconds on a well-built site. On a feed they will scroll for four minutes and give up.

2. The crop is not yours

Feeds impose aspect ratios. A tall painting gets cropped, letterboxed or shrunk to fit a format designed for phone photographs. A diptych is shown as one image or two disconnected ones. A 198 × 168 cm canvas and a 20 × 20 cm study appear at exactly the same size on screen, which quietly erases the thing that most distinguishes them.

On your own site, scale is information you control. Works can be shown at relative size to each other. A large work can be given the width it deserves and a detail crop can sit beside it.

3. There is nowhere to put the facts

A serious enquiry needs: title, medium, dimensions, year, availability, and often price or price-on-request. A caption is a poor container for that, and the information disappears the moment the post is scrolled past.

This is the single most common reason enquiries do not happen. Someone is interested, cannot find the dimensions, decides they will ask later, and never does.

4. Enquiry lives in a direct message

DMs are a terrible enquiry channel for anything expensive. They are unsearchable, easily lost, filtered into request folders, and offer no structure — so you receive “is this still available?” with no indication of which work, and the conversation restarts every time.

A website can put the enquiry next to the work, carry the work’s identity into the message automatically, and deliver it to an inbox you actually manage.

5. You do not own the distribution

Platforms change reach, change formats, get acquired, and occasionally lock accounts with no appeal. Every artist who built an audience on a platform that later changed its algorithm knows this. Your website is the only part of your public presence that cannot be taken away or reprioritised.

So what should the website actually do?

Four things, in order of how often they are the deciding factor:

1. Show the work properly. Correct proportions, honest colour, enough size to read the surface, and no forced uniform crops.
2. Answer the practical questions in text. Medium, dimensions, year, availability. Written, not embedded in an image, so it can be searched and read aloud.
3. Make one obvious next step. Enquiry attached to the individual work, not a general contact page three clicks away.
4. Stay current without you dreading it. If updating the site is a chore, it will go stale, and a stale site is worse than none.

Notice what is not on that list: animation, novelty navigation, a splash screen, or an elaborate “about” essay. Those are the things artists most often ask for and least often need.

How the two work together

The honest model is that Instagram is the street, and your website is the studio. One is where people encounter you incidentally; the other is where they go when they want to look seriously.

That implies a division of labour:

• Post to the feed for reach, process and relationship.
• Link to the site whenever the work needs to be understood, compared or bought.
• Never make someone ask a question in a DM that the site could have answered.

If you are starting from nothing

Build the smallest useful version. That is: a home page that shows current work, an archive that holds the rest, an artwork page template that carries the facts, a short about page, and one reliable contact route. That is a real website, and it will out-perform an elaborate one you never finish.

Everything else — shop, catalogue, newsletter, exhibition pages — can come once the foundation is carrying its weight.