Starting My First Art Website-Foliotwist vs Weebly

This stuff is hard on my brain. When I decided to start publishing my artwork, I didn't realize the amount of work it would take to get it online. Hours upon hours of research has lead me here. Research is not my strong suit! I wish I could hire someone to do all the leg work for me.

Foliotwist versus Weebly: After all the research, it seemed that Foliotwist.com was the clear choice for artists. Simple, efficient, well-designed...but a little costly for someone just starting out ($30+ a month including domain name and awesome support). However, I was willing to pay in order to get all the other things I wanted. And it was SOOO easy! Did I mention that it was so easy? Very user friendly. And I was seriously falling in love with the site I was creating on foliotwist. I had signed up for the 30 day free trial and was about a week into it when my son told me about Weebly. I was really hesitant to even look at it because I had become so comfortable with foliotwist. The defining moment?? When he told me that Weebly was so cheap in comparison (more like $50 for the year including domain name).

I know that money isn't everything and I was already set on foliotwist, but I started researching Weebly, just to see, and found that there were some great reviews and a lot of benefits, including the price difference. Also, there were WAY more template options. The drawbacks? It was significantly more difficult to naviagate and build the site. More choices=more decisions=more time!

Time Commitment: After I searched through the help files and tutorials (took a couple of hours), I felt more comfortable. What you see on my site today is the result of about 100 hours of thinking about it (you know what I am talking about!!), 10 hours of online research, 3-4 hours building foliotwist website (which I am no longer planning on using) and about 3-4 hours learning about and building my site on Weebly, which I am still working on. In fact, this is my first day with a website online and my first blog post ever!! Super exciting. So, ultimately, I decided to go with Weebly.com instead of Foliotwist.com...both sites seem to offer a similar, high-quality product. Weebly took more effort to understand and build but it was also quite a bit less expensive. I decided it was worth it for someone just starting out.

Key Points: I have decided that as long as I remember some key points for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and basic art website guidelines, either site should work, in theory. Some things I will remember:

key words or phrases are VERY important for SEO
page titles and file names also very important for SEO
simple format--nothing flashy/distracting
blog and art on the same site
easy to navigate or people may leave your site before they see the art

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