Your Gallery, Your Website: How to Create a Site You Can Actually Update Yourself

20 Jun

Your gallery reflects your taste, your artists, and your eye for what matters. Your website should work the same way — shaped by you, updated by you, and ready to change the moment your programme does. Here's how to actually build one.

Start with ownership in mind, not just design

It's tempting to focus purely on how a website looks when you're planning a new one. But the more important question is: who will be updating this in six months, and how easily will they be able to do it? If the honest answer is "someone else, with difficulty," it's worth rethinking the approach before you even start designing.

Choose a platform that matches your skill level, not your developer's

Look for a platform where editing is visual — you click on what you want to change and change it, with no code involved. A few mainstream options handle this well, though they suit slightly different people:

Squarespace is highly visual and consistently ranks among the easiest platforms for non-technical users. Design is genuinely open-ended — you're not boxed into a rigid layout — but Squarespace also provides built-in design options and guardrails you can lean on if you'd rather keep things simple than design everything from scratch.
Wix offers similar drag-and-drop ease, with somewhat more layout freedom, which can be a benefit or a distraction depending on how much flexibility you actually want.
Webflow gives you far more design control, but that control comes from a more technical, closer-to-code interface — better suited to someone comfortable with a steeper learning curve.

There's also a category of specialist, art-world-specific platforms — Artlogic, ArtCloud, and ArtGalleria — which combine a website with inventory, client, and sales-management tools built in. These are genuinely useful if you need that operational side handled in the same system as your website, but they come at a higher ongoing cost and with more complexity than a general website builder, so they're worth it mainly if you'd actually use those extra features day-to-day.

For most gallery owners without any technical background, and whose main need is a website they can run themselves, Squarespace or Wix will feel the most immediately comfortable.

Build on a structure made for galleries

I should be upfront here: I specialise in Squarespace as a web designer, so I'm biased toward it. That bias comes from experience, though — time and again, I've found Squarespace to be the platform non-professional web designers can genuinely own, edit, and maintain long-term without needing to rely on a designer or developer on an ongoing basis. That's the lens I'm writing from.

With that said, it's worth comparing the two most common non-technical options honestly. Wix does offer templated designs marketed specifically to art galleries, which Squarespace doesn't. But having looked at a number of them, most don't reflect much real understanding of how galleries actually want to present exhibitions, artists, or works — the structures tend to be generic gallery-styled layouts rather than something built around real gallery workflows. So while Wix technically has gallery templated designs and Squarespace doesn't, in practice it's fairer to treat Squarespace as having no dedicated gallery templates either, since neither option gives you something genuinely built for the job out of the box.

What Squarespace does have is a set of collections and content features that make it straightforward to structure a site around exhibitions, artists, and works, even without a template built specifically for that purpose. That gap — no real gallery template on either platform, but a strong underlying fit on Squarespace — is exactly why I built a Squarespace template specifically for art galleries (see more of this at the end), after working directly with galleries and seeing the space between "build it yourself from scratch" and "pay a designer to build it for you."

Set up a simple update rhythm

Once your site is live, the key to keeping it current is a light routine:

New exhibition confirmed → duplicate the exhibition page template, update details, publish
New artist joins → add their page using the existing format
New artwork → update the relevant works

None of this requires technical skill. It just requires knowing where things live on your own site — which is far easier when you built it yourself.

Keep creative control where it belongs — with you

When you can update your own website, your gallery's voice comes through more clearly. You're not translating your vision through a third party. You decide what goes up, when, and how it's presented — the same way you curate a show.

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Ready to build a site that's truly yours? Explore my Squarespace Art Gallery Template and start creating a website you can run yourself from day one.