Artist Website Design and Development
Personal Reflections
As part of my university internship for MA program in Cultural Studies at KU Leuven, I worked at DMW Gallery, Antwerp. Working through the exhibition cycles at the gallery made me aware of the systemic pressures shaping contemporary curation, and building a website for Fia Cielen, one of the gallery’s represented artists, allowed me to rethink web design as a curatorial practice. In the first half of my internship, my main task was to rebuild Cielen’s website. Although I had previously created personal websites and blogs on free platforms and using vanilla frontend stack (HTML/CSS/Javascript), this was my first experience of developing a professional artist website.
Initially, I understood artist websites as portfolios. However, working on this website revealed them as a far more complex curatorial genre. It is a story that constructs and communicates an artist’s identity, practice, and evolution. Similar to the curatorial practice of mediating between art and audience, artist websites function as multimodal curatorial genres that make artworks visible and build new audiences. The design choices that shape how content is displayed serve as an archival function. It preserves the artist’s corpus, exhibitions, collaborations, and press, much like a curator managing archives or catalogues to track an artist’s career.
Design and Development Process
Websites require hosting and a content management system (CMS) to function effectively and efficiently. The artist’s previous site was built with Adobe Dreamweaver and hosted on One.com. Dreamweaver demands frontend markup languages and scripting knowledge (HTML, CSS, JavaScript) and does not support dynamic content management to update the website without building a custom back-end CMS. The artist wanted a beginner-friendly management for her website. This was the key reason for my involvement. At that point, I had basic front-end experience, but I opted for a drag-and-drop CMS that would allow her to manage the site independently. So, I migrated the site from Adobe Dreamweaver to WordPress, hosted it on Hostinger, and rebuilt it to allow independent content management. I also developed a test site to understand wireframing conventions specific to artist websites.
In design terms, I worked with what has been described as the macro- and micro-structures of artist websites. This step is essential for treating website development as a curatorial practice because it outlines how an artist’s work is presented, navigated, and experienced online by defining layout, user flow, hierarchy, and functionality, much like how curators map spatial flow and narrative logic in physical exhibitions. On the homepage, I designed a horizontal slideshow to foreground her signature works, alongside a visual navigation system linking to key sections. Based on her feedback, we refined the structure further, ultimately prioritizing exhibitions over a conventional portfolio format, with installation views and curatorial texts taking center stage.
At the micro level, each page functioned as a curatorial unit. The ‘About’ page combined biography and CV, while the ‘Exhibitions’ section was organized chronologically to form an intuitive archival structure. Each exhibition page brought together curatorial text and installation imagery to evoke something closer to an experiential exhibition space than a static archive. In keeping with the artist’s preference for minimalism, I maintained a restrained black-and-white visual language across the site.
The project became a way of learning web design as curatorial labour, where structuring content, designing navigation, and shaping visual hierarchy are all part of constructing how an artist is encountered online.
Note: This website is currently inactive due to the expiration of its domain/hosting.