Francis Picabia Our most popular theme is an elegant balance of text, images and white space. Thumbnails are automatically generated, and it comes with easy blogging capabilities, for optional studio updates. With personal tweaks this theme has been chosen by many leading artists. -

Gary Singer A stylish cover page, and attention to detail makes this an elegant variation on the first site, with four rectangular thumbnails instead of five square ones, and different fonts and image handling. -

Rix Jennings A PayPal shopping cart for selling artworks, an inline blog, and easy, drag and drop thumbnail placement makes this site a powerful portfolio and gallery in one. The choice of black is striking. Note also the slick ‘lightbox’ effect for viewing individual works. -

Andy Best A top menu design, with image thumbnails arranged with a ‘drag and drop’ system – each opening up to a separate page for the viewer. Combined with a cover page this makes for an elegant professional solution. -

Mari Houghton An elegant, classical site design, with a unique green background, cover page, and thumbnails to the side of the image. Notice how the large image smoothly changes when the mouse hovers over a smaller image. This website uses flash technology, but unlike other websites, you can update the images yourself online, without outside software. -

Philip Sixking We were able to create a version of the artist’s previous, Flash-based website (which required a web designer to edit or change), and create an elegant, single column site that was easy for the artist to update himself. Note the smooth, time delay slideshow on the home page, easily added to or reordered. There is also a striking use of full sized images throughout to suit the large format paintings. -

Sally-Ann Rowland Talking with the artist about her work led to her suggesting this bold, dusky pink background. With her choice of large format images over thumbnails it makes for a classic looking, and yet highly original, website. -

Marcin Kobylecki Our sites use a slideshow that is easy to add new images to, and visitors can cycle through by clicking on the image itself, by ‘Prev’ ‘Next’ text, or by elegant navigation arrows. Click on the above screen shot to see this used to good effect. -

Michael Muir A full screen and fully resizable cover page, a drop down work menu (arranged by exhibition title), and a colour scheme subtly influenced by the artist’s own paintings makes for a very stylish, contemporary site. (If you look very closely below the painting in this image you might see the ‘edit’ button – which is only viewable whilst you are logged in, for easy editing of your content.) -

Morgan Allender Elegant variations on our most popular themes led to this website that shows Allender’s beautiful large format paintings to great effect. -

Ross Manning A super minimal, elegant site for experimental work. This arrangement features square thumbnails, each opening up to unlimited images, YouTube videos, text, et cetera. -

Dorothy Josey Another version of our most popular layout. You can have thumbnails appear below your images if you prefer – in a grid, as in here, or in one line – with arrows to scroll across between them (not shown). -

Professional Sites and Blogs: Yarn PR Increasingly artists and businesses are adding blogs to their sites – either seamlessly into their websites, or as a separate site, linked to on their main website. This can be a way to keep updates about what is happening in the studio, show press or exhibition shots, or offer works for sale separate from their main promotional site. -

Sites for Craftspeople and Small Businesses: Oak and Elm Artist Website can also do great websites for craftspeople, small businesses, and galleries – often for the same low prices! Send us an email with what you’re after for more information. -

More Options

Want more? We have a bundle of extra options, such as title pages, contact forms, and fancy menu fonts, for as low as $10. We can also create an entirely new theme from scratch, or you can swap between new themes as they become available. Read more on the Options Page.

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This tutorial is for manipulating images if you are using the NextGen software plugin for your images. This is mainly for sites after September, 2011, which often have a ‘lightbox’ (floating) effect, and/or sites that use a shopping cart.

To start, log into your site, via the login link in the footer of your site. Most of you will have broad existing categories you wish to add or remove images from. If so, all of your image manipulation will take place in the ‘Gallery’ section of your dashboard, which looks like this (left). If this is the case you leave your pages unedited – they usually only contain the necessary code to insert your NextGen gallery.

If you would like to create a whole new page, or category, of images – instructions on how to do that are near the end.

With all of these steps, remember to click ‘SAVE CHANGES’ – to save your work!

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How to Rearrange the Order of Your Existing Thumbnails

1. Click on Manage Gallery.

2. Click on the title of the Gallery you would like to manage (usually the same name as the page they are on).

3. Click the button that says ‘Sort Gallery‘.

4. You can specify any number of ordering systems (date, title, etc). I recommend ‘Unsorted’, which lets you drag and drop the thumbnails into the order you want.

5. Save your changes and return back to the previous screen.

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How to Add New Images to an Existing Gallery

1. Click on Add Gallery / Images.

2. Click Browse to find the image on your computer.

3. Where it says Choose Gallery, identify the individual gallery name (usually same as the page name) you want it to appear on.

4. Press Upload Images.

5. You can modify the image or image details if you want, as per the other images already in your gallery.

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How to Delete an Image from an Existing Gallery

1. Click on Manage Gallery.

2. Click on the title of the Gallery you would like to manage (usually the same name as the page they are on).

3. Hover over the thumbnail of the image, and click ‘delete‘ that appears.

4. You can also bulk delete by filling in the boxes to the left of the image(s), and selecting ‘Delete Images‘ from the dropdown menu.

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How to Change the Title and Work Details (that Appear near the Large Images)

1. Click on Manage Gallery.

2. Click on the title of the Gallery name you would like to manage (usually the same name as the page they are on).

3. Under Alt & Title Text / Description.

The first box is the title or text you want when someone hovers over the image (this text is displayed if there is a problem loading an image).

The second box appears under your large image usually, and sometimes under the thumbnail if you have a special template. Normally you are limited to one ‘line’ of text – however if you are feeling fancy, you can use the code <br /> to make line breaks. Simply copy and paste <br /> wherever you want one to appear.

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How to Change the Size of Your Image, or Thumbnail sizes

1. Click on Manage Gallery.

2. Click on the title of the Gallery name you would like to manage (usually the same name as the page they are on).

3. Hover over the thumbnail of the image you want to change, and click ‘Edit thumb‘. Follow the instructions on screen.

4. If you want to change the size of your image, place a tick in the box next to the image, and find more options by clicking the downward button where it says ‘Bulk Actions‘. Find the one to change the image size, and click Apply.

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How to Change the Number of Thumbnails, and Number of Columns, that appear

Please note to remember the settings that your site was already set at before changing this setting! Feel free to change the layout, but allow yourself to change it back if you are less happy than before.

1. Click on Options.

2. Click the tab that says ‘Gallery‘.

3. Here you can change the number of thumbnails per page (0 is all images per page), and the number of columns (0 will be a flexible grid, depending on how wide the person’s browser). Change them to what suits you best.

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Changing the Style of Your Large Image Slideshow (eg. ‘What Happens When You Click’)

There are too many options to go through here, but you can change the ‘lightbox’ effect that appears when you click on a thumbnail to any number of styles.

You can change the color (black, white, grey) and the effect (lightbox, thickbox), as well as other fine tuning, under ‘options‘.

If you have a customized effect, you may need to contact me for more details.

How to Add Completely New Categories of Images

This is a more advanced technique, but it is a logical, step by step process, so you will likely be able to follow it relatively easily.

Before you add any images, you will need a Page to hold your gallery. So go to Pages > Add New on your dashboard, and call it what you would like (eg. ‘Bird Paintings’).

Before you publish, open up another tab and create the Gallery to go in there. Go to Gallery > Add Gallery / Images. Open the tab that says Add New Gallery. Put in a title that will be easy for you to remember (this will not be published to anyone else). Then, click Add Gallery.

Important step! Once you click Add Gallery, a small (but important) notice will appear, something like this:

That top section contains a code to make your new gallery appear on your page. (It will be something like [nggallery id=8] - the last number depends upon how many other galleries you have).

Copy and paste this code into your Page you created earlier, including the square brackets. (If you forget to copy this code, you can guess a different number in the example here. Count how many galleries you have to guess close to the right number).

Click Publish on your Page. You mightn’t see anything yet – but you now have a new page and a gallery to add images to. Simply follow any of the other instructions above, to add, remove, reorder or style the images you wish to include in this new gallery.

Troubleshooting

You may have followed all of the steps above, but still don’t see your new page appear in your menu. If so, you may have something called an Advanced Menu. An Advanced Menu is an extra feature, that lets you include email links, subpages, home pages, external links, and other fancy things in your menu (and even leave some pages out, like cover pages or splash pages).

If this is the case, you only need to do one more step. To find where your Advanced Menus are, go to Appearance > Menus. There is a handy tutorial for using Advanced Menus here. You have a menu already, so you only really need to pay attention from the 2:08 minute mark.

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If You Have a Checkout and Shopping Cart – Changing Your Price and Title Details

1. Click on Manage Gallery.

2. Click on the title of the Gallery name you would like to manage (usually the same name as the page they are on).

3. Under Alt & Title Text / Description

The first box is the title or text you want when someone hovers over the image (this text is displayed if there is a problem loading an image)

The second box appears under the thumbnail, and uses the code <br /> to make line breaks – copy and paste <br /> wherever you want one to appear.

You can edit any of these lines, eg.

Title<br />

$245<br />

The next line of shortcode produces the cart information. Copy, paste, or edit this code to change the details:

eg. in

[wp_cart:Formations-Artwork2:price:245:end]

Formations-Artwork2 is the title (used to indicate to the buyer and you which work is being sold)

245 is the price in US dollars.

Change the title or price to what you would like.

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That is the basics to using your NextGen gallery, but there are loads of other options! Google ‘NextGen Gallery’ and your question to learn more, and if you can’t find what you need, leave a comment and I’ll try to answer your question for everybody.