Hi, I’ve had a good look through this and have plenty of (too many of?) thoughts for you. Sorry there’s so much, but I hope some of it is useful for you. The general gist of it is “this looks great” and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it functions. I’d like to see a bit more example content to get an idea of how the site could/would work fully.

How do you document your work right now?
I have no current setup - I’ve had a long break from producing new works and exhibiting. The remnants are an old word document with an “Arts CV” (I guess Arts Resume in American?), a spreadsheet which contained a list of works, which linked to a folder of photos (which I can’t find). There was also a now-offline website, which pretty much duplicated the above. More recently, there’s just some photos on my phone, lost amongst thousands of other unsorted photos, and my own memory.

I was considering looking at using Pixelfed mixed with some other Fediverse social media, but there was no British instance, so I thought I’d probably have to set one up myself, then I didn’t bother.

What do you like / hate about your current setup?
There is no current system, so very much looking at options at the moment.

What is your first impression about the project at this stage?
My actual thought process, if useful:
“Oh its a website, I’m not sure I want an online thing. How does this work then? How are they going to keep this running, how much does it cost. Ooh, are those American dollars, that’s not a good sign… Hmm, the yearly price still shows the monthly cost… okay, that’s actually pretty good value for a yearly payment.”

“I actually quite like this. It’s very slickly put together. That works nicely. Ah, it’s pretty empty at the moment, of course. Is that a clickable thing? (It said chain-picture ig)”

I’m probably being a bit silly or overcautious, but I have a slight worry over online things, and particularly American-hosted ones (I can’t find any info on where it’s based, so I’m basing this off the dollars and the inches). I’m based in the UK, and the political situation… well, it’s not impossible that suddenly the US will completely block the UK from accessing any of its websites, on a whim. It doesn’t inspire long-term stability at the moment. Another problem is the UK’s current Internet Policies - if any other artist uploads so much as a boob, you may fall foul of our new “Online Safety Act” - then people in the UK won’t be able to view the website without registering and uploading passports etc - or you have to block access to the UK. For a site like this to be most useful, you’d kind of need it to be viewable by anyone, like a normal website. Many galleries will not view things you need a log-in for, unless it’s a platform they officially or personally use themselves - which is why it’s still recommended to have your own website alongside.

I really like the sound of some of the features like “Export Profile, Catalogue and Portfolios to PDF” sounds amazing - I’d love to see a demo of it to understand exactly what it’s doing.

What would you want to see (or not see) in a tool like this?
For further, more in-depth thoughts, I think in this example/info gathering stage, you could do with a few ‘fully featured’ example/fake artists to test/check things with, and perhaps a demo of what the fully-logged-in experience is like. We could do with some more examples, all the way through, how/what it looks like, how many bits of info can be interlinked (i.e. if a specific work has been shown at numerous galleries, should those galleries/exhibitions in turn have their own pages, which show a list of other works from the same/other exhibition(s)?) I mean like the artist page may have a profile and a list of works, shows, exhibitions, galleries they’ve exhibited at - but then having exhibition pages to show works, artists, galleries, and gallery pages would in turn show exhibition, works, artists… it sort of depends what sort of direction you want to go in - whether it’s an online portfolio to show your work to people, or a sort of database of literally everything connected to the works, like a gallery/museum Collections Management System (you mention condition reports on the website, for example).

Again, it’s hard to tell based on the data that’s currently on there (one artist), but perhaps things to consider with links to other websites, basic info/profile/statement, nation or city, contact detail options, perhaps? (Can people message through it, or link to a mastodon account or whatever?)

Some things are a bit dependent on the direction you want to go in - is it for artists to show their portfolios, should it be for purchasers to find artworks, or curators to find new artists? Are you focusing more/less on emerging, mid-career, amateur, professional… those who produce art for sales, those who produce art for exhibition in public galleries, those who produce work for commission?

It’s hard to know the capabilities until more info is on there - i.e. can someone put a statement/info next to each work, can they put a general statement about their own work, can they group sets of works together into sets/series? For an artist who works in sound, video, painting, performance etc, is there any way of separating these?

Once there’s more content, you’re going to need some serious tagging going on - though again, this depends on future plans - if it’s to be useful for curators to search through, do you need nation, city, year, age of artist, gender of artist, medium, size, genre, style, themes etc i.e. “I need a list of British and Western European female artists under 50 years old who produce paintings with themes covering science, mathematics and engineering”

Other notes and thoughts which don’t answer your questions
Artists are weird, and you’re going to get weird data people want to put in. What if someone does a performance work in the middle of a city centre, what if they exhibited a film on a moving boat-cinema which started in one town and ended in another? What if the exhibited artwork was one large piece of work, but at the end of the exhibition, it was cut into 1024 pieces and sold individually? An installation work which included both physical objects and audio or video- and they sold the object but not the video (There’s similar problems in institutions when accessioning new works). I think at some point you have to lock down the system and say “well, you’ll just have to work with what’s there”.

For dealing with similar things in the past, I’ve previously basically invented “fake artists” to test out exhibition application forms and things - try and imagine the most outrageous artwork/artist possible and see how much it breaks your forms, sections and tickboxes - once the form can be used correctly by a “70 year old traditional amateur painter”, but also “an artist that makes only smells”, “an artist who legally has no name” and “an artist who does 48 hour long endurance drum solos using frozen fish”, you know the form is pretty robust. I’d imagine the same might work for a website :)

The existing framework is good - though I have a slight worry that if it tries to do to much, ending up almost like a full collections management system, that it’ll become horrifically unwieldy, perhaps?

Who decides whether it is or isn’t art? Anything that pays the fee? What about with free sign-ups? You can easily end up with “Oh, is that the website for Furry sex cartoons”, which may not be your original intent.

A few usability bits
On the current site, when viewing an artwork by “toro”, I’d like to be able to click/swipe left/right buttons or use left/right arrow keys to go to the next one - if I wanted to view a portfolio, for example.

On the current example, the measurements are in inches, I think? Maybe also put them in non-US measurements, to show both (or give a settings page to select).

When you’re on an artist’s page, there’s no back button or anything to go back to the main website page.

Anyway, sorry I’ve repeated myself a few times and gone off on a few tangents, but hopefully there’s a few useful points in there! It generally looks really good, and I’m really interested in how it’s going to move forward.