Catalogue-quality presentation,
commerce-quality plumbing.
Galleries, exhibition spaces, artist representatives. The site is both the catalogue and the cash register — and the visitor expects neither to apologise for being there.
Gallery sites have a peculiar dual job: they have to function as exhibition catalogues for current shows (where the goal is contemplation, not purchase) and as inventory listings for available work (where the goal IS purchase, but disguised). The trick is doing both without one feeling like an interruption of the other. Most gallery sites we audit collapse the two — either the entire site is shop-coded, which insults the artistic register, or the entire site is exhibition-coded, which makes the actual buying journey feel illicit. The split has to be deliberate and architected.
On pricing visibility
Galleries have a longstanding convention of POA (price on application) for available works. This made sense when most buyers were collectors who’d call. It works less well now that a meaningful percentage of contemporary art is bought by people in their thirties who don’t want to phone-call about anything. The compromise we’ve settled on with most gallery clients: list prices for works under ₹10 lakh openly; use POA for the secondary-market and higher-end primary work. The split roughly matches buyer expectations — younger buyers shopping at the entry-level need prices to filter; serious collectors at the high end expect the conversation.
Should artists have their own pages on our gallery site?
Yes — ideally with full biographies, exhibition history, press, available works, and (if the artist has approved) commissioned-work pages. The gallery site is often the canonical online presence for represented artists, even when those artists have their own sites — gallery sites tend to rank better, get more press traffic, and serve as the “official” source for sales-ready inventory. Make the artist pages first-class, not afterthoughts. Use proper schema markup (Person + VisualArtwork) for the artworks; it helps with Google’s knowledge panel for searchable artists.
Devika — who handles design strategy for our gallery clients — insists on a rule we’ve come to respect: no parallax scrolling on artwork detail pages, ever. The artwork should sit still while the viewer engages with it. Modern web design fashions want movement; the work doesn’t.
Building for art gallery?
Let's talk specifics.
Two-business-day reply on the first message. We'll come back with three questions and one honest take.
Call us — picked up by a human+91 88820 82228WhatsApp us — replies in minutes+91 88820 82228