Lamia Saab Muhtar Case Study
The Evolution of an Artist’s Website
The Brief
Lamia Saab Muhtar is a Lebanese mixed media artist. Lamia’s original website was a Flash website mainly consisting of image galleries. The galleries were annoying to browse because they had thumbnails that automatically moved left or right on mouse over, and since there were a lot of thumbnails, they used to move really fast because they were very mouse-sensitive. Users would also have to wait for images to load whenever they’d click a thumbnail. Website was not mobile nor SEO friendly. The website also needed to be changed into something more commercial, something that would increase sales and exposure.
My Role
Optimize and revamp the website to give the artist more exposure and increase sales.
How The Website Evolved
V1. The Flash Gallery
As an initial quick fix, I first modified little things in the website to make it gift/sales oriented as opposed to gallery/display oriented. I re-positioned it as a place where you can order and buy original artwork as gifts. That helped to a certain extent, and more orders started coming in, but that wasn’t really sustainable because most orders were new custom art orders.
V1.1. Art as Gifts
V2. The Online Shop
I then decided to turn the website into a legit online shop instead of an image gallery to try to generate profit for the artist by selling her existing artwork.
After testing the shop in the market for a few months, we found out that an online shop for art in Lebanon isn’t the best solution. Art is not cheap, and people here aren’t used to buying things for 4 digit prices online (or offline for that matter).
V3. Mobile Friendly
We decided to redesign the website and revert to a gallery oriented website but make it easy to browse and easy to update or add content to using a content management system. This new website would also be optimized to run smoothly on mobile devices. Below was the outcome…
Wًhile this website loaded fast on mobile, it was too minimal and not too interesting. It didn’t really reflect the artist’s brand and value.
V4. The Art Gallery
I decided to revamp the site into something more creative. Along with the website revamp, I chose to also revamp the artist’s branding. The new logo gave a classier and more elegant /refined vibe. I chose to turn the website into a horizontal scrolling art gallery to emulate how we view art galleries in real life, and also as a way to stand out from other artists’ websites. The artist can now truly use the website as an online or virtual art gallery.
You can check out Lamia’s website on lamiasaabmuhtar.com.