What super-hero can remain insensitive to a call for help from an amazing comics artist? Accompanying Key-ArT from the first draft of the website that she created, until the public reveal of www.key-art.fr a couple of weeks later has been a fantastic adventure.
Technologies: WordPress, HTML, CSS Services:
WordPress Configuration,
Content Creation,
Publishing Automation,
Digital Strategy,
SEO
Quick Story
Key-ArT is a French artist, based in Normandy, and of whom I have always been a big fan. Starting from painting and drawing for her own pleasure, she started to create pieces of art for her family and friends. Until the moment when she became famous enough to be asked to install her first exhibition in a concept-store in Le Havre. In parallel, she enriched her skills by making customs on shoes that is now an important part of her production.
Her universe including pop-art, comics or super-heroes is perfectly represented by her paintings. But she is also good at hyper-realism when using charcoal and pencils. Any piece of wood, cloth or rock can also let her express her creativity. She recently started exploring the world of shoes customization and brings a bit of art on numerous happy customers’ feet.
The Project
Mid-January 2021, Key-ArT contacted me with a few questions about the website that she was trying to setup alone. After a quick chat, I offered my help to try making it as good as she was expecting.
Starting from the beginning…
The first step has been to go through the hosting provider setup and configure a few technical details about redirections and SSL certificates to make the website accessible through many paths with http/https, www or not, keyart/key-art. Once done, everything was pointing to the same WordPress site destination. I also setup a backup system and a development website, as a clone of the existing one, to make sure to be able to test configurations or changes without impacting the production one.
Then, the important was to have a good work base so we spent some time benchmarking a lot of WordPress themes to find the most relevant for an artist website, pretty and customizable enough to fit Key-ArT’s ambition. With the help of a set of useful extensions that I installed, we managed to make a decision about the structure of the site and how we can organize the contents.
Time to feed the beast!
One of my objectives with that project was to avoid the author having to create manually some complex posts and managing internal links because that is the major source of mistakes and inconsistencies. That is the reason why I setup most of the pages to have their content generated automatically from the posts. All galleries, recent work or similar components would be directly updated on any new published content. I also created the main pages (home, about, legal or contact) with an extensive use of performant components.
The next step was to provide some pieces of advice in order to have Key-ArT being autonomous and starting creating her content. From discussions about the images format and compression, to the explanations about the watermarking to protect her images, Key-ArT has been guided to get the best from her media library. I also let her know about the legal parts of her website and what she had to do to comply with regulations. Finally, I took advantage of my experience to suggest some text, image, layout changes to try to make her website stand out of the crowd.
All done ?
After the final polishing with some custom CSS code to customize a bit the layout of the website theme, a major task was remaining: the SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Indeed, the visibility of our work will be highly impacted by the way Google like our site or not! So, an important effort has been made on clarifying to Key-ArT all tips and good habits to make her content referenced the most.
I also setup some monitoring tools like the Google Search Console and suggested to create an account in Google My Business to give the complete control on the Key-ArT data to its owner.
3, 2, 1, Go !
The website is ready. And now?
We decided and planned a communication strategy with Key-ArT in order to reveal it to her fan community. With a couple of social posts on her favorite networks over a few days, the website has finally been publicly announced on February 21th, 2021.
From then, I am now making sure that she updates all her social profiles and accounts with the new website address and I am providing a regular monitoring. I also started a regular maintenance to make sure that the website stays as performant and up-to-date as possible in the future.
Should you appreciate this story and want to discover this amazing artist, please visit the website and follow her with all her social accounts!
