How your website works

Every Artlook subscription, including the free trial, includes a website. For any of this to work, Use Artlook to power a website must be switched on in General settings — see Website settings for choosing its template, colours and fonts, and your website address for how people actually reach it. Your site’s content, though, comes from your inventory and your groupings, not from separate pages you write by hand.

The easier way: Web Helper

Everything on this page can be done directly in Artlook, working with groupings and inventory records as described below — but most people find it quicker to use Web Helper instead: a dedicated app for building and managing your website’s pages without needing to work through Artlook’s own screens at all. It’s editing exactly the same underlying data, so this page is still worth understanding, but if you just want to get your site looking good, start with Web Helper.

Publishing individual pieces

On an inventory record’s Core data tab, tick On website? to publish it. Alongside that you can choose to hide its price or status, and whether it’s offered for sale (with price variants, if you use the Ecommerce module).

Building pages from groupings

Your website’s pages are built from groupings, based on their grouping type:

• Web_home — home page content. You can use up to three groupings of this type; they’re ordered by each grouping’s Sort priority.
• Web_exhibition — appears under your Exhibitions page (or whatever you’ve renamed it to).
• Web_gallery — appears under your Galleries page.
• Web_page — a standalone page with its own menu item.

Make sure Publish to web site is ticked on each grouping you want to appear.

A grouping’s page shows its title (also used as the menu item, for a Web_page grouping), its image and any extra images from the grouping’s Images tab as a carousel, its description, and the items within it — each one clickable through to a full detail page. If you’ve pasted a Google Maps embed code into the grouping’s Location field, a map displays too — handy for an exhibition page or an About page showing where you’re based.

A grouping’s On your website tab explains exactly how (or whether) it currently displays on your site, with shortcut buttons for common fixes — for example, if it isn’t showing yet, a button there switches it on and makes the other changes needed to surface it.

Your artists page

If you enable the Artists page in website settings, it lists your Artist-type contacts — each one’s name, profile picture and biography come from their own contact record rather than from anywhere in the Website settings. See adding an artist’s biography for exactly where to edit these. Your gallery’s own contact details are shown or hidden according to your website settings choices.

Note

Website settings also offers a separate Biography page (which you can rename, for example to “My Profile”) for your gallery’s own about page. Its content is edited in Web Helper, using the About you page type.

Quick guide: building a simple home page

1. Switch on Use Artlook to power a website in General settings.
2. Add some artworks in Inventory, with titles and images, ticking On website? on each.
3. Create a new grouping, give it a title and an image, tick Publish to website, and set its Grouping type to Web_home. Click Save.
4. On the Items tab, use Click here to add new items to add the artworks you want on the page.
5. For an image carousel at the top of the page, add images on the Images tab, then save again.
6. Check the On your website tab to see how the page will display, with a link through to it on your live site.

Repeat with other Grouping types — Web_page, Web_exhibition, Web_gallery — to build out the rest of your site.

Once you have some content published, see your website options for a look at the templates on offer, then head to Website settings to choose your template, colours and fonts — or do the whole thing, start to finish, in Web Helper instead.