The Evolution of an Artist’s Website

Lamia Saab Muhtar is a Lebanese mixed media artist.

The Problem or Challenge:

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.

I then decided to turn the website into a legit online shop instead of an image gallery.

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). 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. Here’s the final outcome: