Lamia Saab Muhtar Case Study

The Evolution of an Artist’s Website


Context:

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.

Website Version 1.0:


My Role:

Optimize and redesign the website to give the artist more exposure and increase sales.

My Approach & Solution:

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.

Website Version 1.5:


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

Website Version 2.0:


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:

Website Version 3.0


You can check out Lamia’s website on www.lamiasaabmuhtar.com.