Either...
A website is an absolutely necessary piece of online real estate for every artist, where you can display, promote, and sell your work.
Or...
A website is an expensive way to waste time you could have spent painting. You have to learn to code, or pay someone to do it for you, and either way it costs you time or money.
Your expensive premium WordPress theme looks great, but it slows down your site so much that Google hates you. So you waste half a day checking out fast loading free themes, every one of which is exactly wrong for your site.
Also, one third of your surprisingly low traffic is bored east european kids trying to hack your database for the fun of it, as you will discover when you're obsessively perusing your visitor logs in your host company's back end and wondering why nobody drops by. And your email sign ups will dump you the moment they get that free gift you gave them in exchange for their email address, never to be heard from again.
Which of these points of view is true? Well, they both are. Kind of. If you've reached a place in your art career where people are looking you up online, getting a website is a logical step to take, or at least it can be if you have a realistic expectations of online sales or some other kind of profitable contact from it - perhaps commissions, or exhibition invitations.
If you decide to go with the 'Heck, yes I want a website!' option, remember it's not all upside. Creating a customer base and selling your work without paying gallery commission? Well, that makes sense. Having to deal with the heavy lifting a good gallery would do for you in return for their commission? That's when it starts to look a little less inviting.
I've been looking at art marketing advice online, given that I'm ready to start selling my paintings, and one thing every art consultant agreed on was the absolute necessity of having your own artist's website. Given that all of them just happened to be selling artist's websites, I decided to take that advice with a grain of salt.
If you haven't reached the place where your name is getting Googled on a regular basis, maybe you should concentrate on your painting until it does. And, for once, I'll be taking my own advice and not getting my own website yet.
