Resources for creating and promoting your artist’s (or whatever kind of) website:

After realising that my most popular blog post on this site has nothing to do with my art, I did a teeny bit of moping. Then I got over it. I understood that there are people just like me out there, searching in the dark for the tools to put together their own websites themselves.

Fair enough. I spent a lot of 2016 learning the basics thanks to Google and in 2017 I turned out to be a more successful blogger than artist! Crazy, right? It turns out you actually can make money from a blog.

The thing is, after putting a website together, you have to figure out how to promote it. It’s not easy, and there are often too many information sources competing for headspace, but a simple list of things that another working blogger is using is a great place to start.

So here are all of the tools that I use and recommend.

(P.S. I run my sites on self-hosted WordPress platforms.)

Blog resource list

Creating and hosting your site

FREE domain name – get a free .design domain name for one year. Diarise the date for renewal to make sure you’re getting a great deal still.

FREE domain name – you can also get a .co.uk and .uk domain name free for one year.

Siteground – Siteground are my own web hosting providers, who I highly recommend. I made the switch from iPage in 2017 and absolutely love them! Their customer service is fantastic and that is a major factor when managing your website.

Their plans start at £2.95 a month before VAT.

It’s definitely worth shopping around between different registrars and hosts as there are sometimes significant price differences for the same domain names – but it’s hard to beat free!

Read this post to see how to get a free domain and website.

Branding your site

Logojoy is a site that uses AI technology to create logos starting from $20 – a bit of a bridge between bootstrapping and hiring someone in. For a full review of Logojoy check out this article.

Fiverr is a site where you can hire cheap creative services for your business. I’ve listed this under branding, but you can find almost any kind of service on Fiverr. Watch out though; you often get what you pay for.

Monetising your blog

Affiliate Window – if you have a website or blog that you would like to monetize, I highly recommend looking into affiliate marketing. AffiliateWindow is a great company to start with, and requires a £5 ‘deposit’ to get started. This money is credited to your account balance, and is returned to you once your balance reaches the payment threshold of £20.

ValuedVoice is a network connecting social influencers and bloggers to paid opportunities.

Promoting your blog

Offline

Moo – Moo produce faultless quality business cards with short runs and their printfinity feature gives you the chance to have a different photo on every card. Naturally this makes Moo a favourite with artists like me! This link gets you 20% off your first order.

Snapfish – low cost photo printing and printed homewares – handy for branding items for giveaways or marketing. Click here to view all special offers.

Online

Pinterest is a major driver of traffic to blogs and it’s definitely worth spending some time on your Pinterest game. Many pro bloggers recommend Tailwind to automate your Pinterest account with this scheduling app and improve traffic to your website/blog.

Tailwind – as mentioned before, a highly recommended scheduling app for Pinterest and Instagram. This link gives you a $15 credit to try: definitely enough to figure out if it works for you.

Right now I’m trying a manual pinning technique that I’ve designed myself. I’ll get back to you on how that’s working out!

Recurpost – Twitter, Facebook, Facebook groups, Instagram – Recurpost can manage them all. It’s a very good alternative to more expensive social media scheduling tools like Meet Edgar or CoSchedule. The benefit it has over tools like Buffer and Hootsuite is that you can build up a content library of your links that don’t disappear once they’ve been posted; rather, they’re recycled.

I hope this list has been of some use – these are all services that I’ve used or am currently using, and I’m sure you’ll enjoy them as much as I have.

What about resources specifically for artists?

That’s coming soon!

Find more blogging articles here.

This post contains affiliate links, marked by an *

Customise Illdy without losing your mind.

Need a domain? Get a .design, .ink or .wiki domain for $5!*

I was a total WordPress novice when I decided to make the leap and switch this site over from Weebly to WordPress. Honestly, I had no idea what I was doing, and fumbled around until I found a theme I loved – Illdy.

It was free, which was amazing, as it gave me the best-looking website I’d ever owned; but of course there were some things that I needed to tweak as I grew more confident with code.

Here are some of the css code snippets I’ve used to customise Illdy for my website.

Adapting to Illdy updates

I’ve dreaded each update to the Illdy theme, because there’s always some major change to cope with. This means there’s new codes and changes to add to this post, so bear with me as I add them soon. And yes, I actually created a child theme for Illdy to prevent the changes, but somehow I couldn’t get my child theme to respond fully to all the changes I’d made… so I had to stick to the developer’s theme.

But then, the last update made my site look horrendous, and I went running back to my child theme. It’s meant that some of my links won’t change to the right colour, but I’m trying to work on more important things at the moment… in the grand scheme of things, a few yellow hover links don’t make a difference.

Hey, I’m still a novice; I just do my best.

The CSS codes to change Illdy, and what they do.

Change colour of links

.markup-format a {
    color: red;
}

Remove link underline

.markup-format a {
 text-decoration: none;
}

Remove yellow dots from jumbotron

#header .bottom-header span.span-dot {
display: none;
}

Like this post? Check out the resources I use for creating and managing my websites!

Change contact form background colour

#contact-us {
background-color: #ffffff 
!important;
}

Change contact form name, email and subject background and border colours

 
#contact-us .section-content .wpcf7-form p .wpcf7-text {
background-color: #ffffff;border: 1px solid #baa9a9;
}

Change contact form message box background and border colours

#contact-us .section-content .wpcf7-form textarea {
background: #ffffff !important;border: 1px solid #baa9a9;
}

Change colour of the first jumbotron button

#header .bottom-header .header-button-one{    
line-height: 63px;    background: #e83904;    border: none;
}

Change hover colour of the first jumbotron button

#header .bottom-header .header-button-one:hover{    
background: #1a2226
}

Change colour of the second jumbotron button

#header .bottom-header .header-button-two {    
background: #1a2226;
}

Change hover colour of the second jumbotron button

#header .bottom-header .header-button-two:hover {    
background: #e83904;
}

Change colour of widget lines

.widget .widget-title:before {
background-color: #e83904;
}

Change hover colour of social share widget

.widget ul li:before {
color: #e83904;
}

Change colour of “read more” link under blog preview

#latest-news .section-content .post .post-button {
color: #e83904;
}

Change colour of “read blog” button

#latest-news .latest-news-button {    
background: #e83904;
}

Change colour of “read more” button on blog page

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-button { background-color: #e83904 !important; }

Change colour of author icon on blog post

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-author .fa {    
color: #e83904;
}

Change colour of author text on blog post

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-author {    
color: #888;
}

Change colour of date published icon on blog post

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-time .fa, #blog .blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-categories .fa {    
color: #e83904;
}

Change colour of comments icon on blog post

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-comments .fa {    
color: #e83904;
}

Remove/change padding on home page

body.home.page section.content-area {    
padding-top: 0;
}

body.home.page section.content-area {    
padding-bottom: 0;
}

body.page .post-inner-content {    
padding-bottom: 0;
}

body.page .post-inner-content {    
padding-top: 0;
}

Remove/change padding on about section

#about, #static-page-content {     
padding: 10px 0 0px 0;
}

Remove/change padding on latest news/blog section

#latest-news, #static-page-content { 
padding: 0px 0 0px 0; 
}

Remove/change padding on contact us section

#contact-us, #static-page-content { 
padding: 0px 0 0px 1; 
}

Remove title from blog titles and page titles

#header .bottom-header h1 {
display:none;
}

Change display size for mobile devices

@media only screen and (max-width: 768px) {
#header {
background-attachment: initial !important;
}
}

@media only screen and (max-width: 480px){
#header .bottom-header h2 { 
font-size: 30px; line-height: 1.2; 
}

.top-header img { 
width: 250px; 
}

#header .bottom-header { 
padding-top: 50px; padding-bottom: 50px; 
}
}

Hide date published

.blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-time { 
display: none;
}

Hide author

.blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-author { 
display: none;
}

Hide comments

.blog-post .blog-post-meta .post-meta-comments { 
display: none;
}

Change Mailchimp subscribe button text colour

input#mc-embedded-subscribe.button { 
color: #ffffff 
}

Change Mailchimp subscribe button colour

input#mc-embedded-subscribe.button { 
background: #e83904;
}

Change contact form submit button text colour

input.wpcf7-form-control.wpcf7-submit  { 
color: #ffffff 
}

Change contact form submit button colour

input.wpcf7-form-control.wpcf7-submit { 
background: #e83904;
}

Change widget text colour

.widget a {
    color: #e83904;
}

Remove page titles

#blog .blog-post .blog-post-title { display: none;
}

The end.

So there you have it – all the codes I’ve used to change aspects of this WordPress theme. I hope it’s been of some use to you… and remember, I’m an artist, not a web developer. This is just my hobby 🙂

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