Guides → Build an artist site on SGEN in 30 minutes

Build an artist site on SGEN in 30 minutes

A 30-minute walkthrough for painters, sculptors, printmakers, and visual artists — gallery, exhibitions, biography, press, contact, optional print shop, published.

This tutorial takes a working artist from a fresh SGEN account to a live studio site in about half an hour. The build covers six visible pages, a primary gallery with lightbox-style image presentation, an exhibitions timeline showing past and upcoming shows, a biography page that reads like an artist statement rather than a resume, a press page collecting reviews and mentions, a contact page for galleries and collectors, and an optional shop for prints or available originals. Every step lists the click path, the expected screen, and the time budget.

What you'll have at the end: a live artist site at a *.sgen.com preview URL (or your own domain, if you have one), six pages published, a gallery showing twelve to forty works with lightbox open-on-click and a clean caption strip, an exhibitions timeline with three to ten past and upcoming entries, a biography page with your statement and CV-style facts, a press page with two to six review pull-quotes, a contact page directing galleries and collectors to the right inbox, and an optional print shop with three to six available editions or originals. The site is responsive, accessible, and ready to send to a gallery or a collector.

What is this for?

This page is for working artists who need a public web presence that respects the work — painters, sculptors, printmakers, photographers working as fine artists, ceramicists, textile artists, glass artists, mixed-media artists, and any visual artist building toward gallery representation, public commissions, or direct collector sales. The thirty-minute target assumes you already have the work documented — photographed cleanly, with titles, dates, materials, and dimensions — sitting in a folder on your machine. The build is the publish step, not the document-the-work step.

The structure is opinionated. An artist site needs five things working together: a gallery that shows the work without competing with it, an exhibitions timeline that establishes credibility and points to upcoming public visibility, a biography page that reads like an artist statement rather than a corporate resume, press coverage that signals critical attention, and a clear contact path for the specific audiences who reach out to artists (galleries, collectors, curators, writers). The template covers all five out of the box and gives you a place to add an optional shop.

This is a tutorial in the strict sense — you build the example, then keep it. Unlike the five-minute quickstart, the artist site you publish here is meant to be the working version a gallery sees when they search for you. The sample data slots are placeholders for your actual works, shows, and statement; swap them inline as you go.

If you have shipped an artist site on Cargo, Format, Squarespace, or a hand-coded portfolio years ago, the SGEN path will feel familiar in structure and considerably faster in finish. The image-presentation and ownership characteristics differ from those platforms, but the authoring flow is recognizable.

Good use cases

Reach for this tutorial when:

You are a working painter or sculptor with gallery shows behind you and ahead of you, and you need a site that reads as professional from the first page load.
You are a printmaker selling editions direct to collectors and you need a clean gallery alongside an optional shop for available prints.
You are an emerging artist building toward first gallery representation and you need a site to send with cold outreach to galleries.
You are a mid-career artist refreshing an outdated site that no longer reflects the current body of work.
You are a photographer working as a fine artist (not a commercial photographer with a portfolio — that is the portfolio tutorial) and you need a site that treats images as works rather than as case-study illustrations.
You are a ceramicist, glass artist, or textile artist whose work photographs well and benefits from a gallery layout with lightbox open-on-click for material detail.

What NOT to use this for

This tutorial does not cover:

High-volume print-on-demand storefronts (hundreds of products, automated fulfillment). That is an ecommerce build with a different starter and inventory model.
Commercial illustration portfolios for client outreach (editorial, advertising). Use the portfolio tutorial — the structure is built for case-study clients rather than collectors.
Gallery or art-fair websites with multiple represented artists. That is closer to the agency tutorial — multiple artist profiles, each with its own gallery, under one parent brand.
Educational platforms teaching technique (workshop calendars, video courses). That is closer to the membership tutorial — gated content with subscription tiers.
Museum or institutional sites with collection databases and curator-managed exhibitions. SGEN can host an institutional site but the build shape differs from this single-artist tutorial.

How this connects to other features

The artist build touches six surfaces. Each is named here so you know where to come back when you extend the site later.

SG-Builder — the visual editor where the gallery, exhibitions timeline, bio, press, and contact pages get arranged. Most of the thirty minutes is spent here.
SG-Core → Media — the image library where your work documentation lives. The build assumes you upload here once, then place into the gallery from the picker.
SG-Modules → Forms — the form module powering the Contact page. The default contact form delivers to the email on your account; you can route galleries to one inbox and collectors to another later.
SG-Modules → Shop — the optional commerce module powering the print or original-sales page. Step 7 is optional; if you are not selling direct, skip the step and the page.
SG-Modules → SEO — the per-page meta description and OG image surface. Skip on first pass; revisit when you have time to write descriptions.
SG-Dashboard → Analytics — the visit and referrer dashboard. Available once the site has traffic; not relevant during the build itself.

For the build steps alone, the only two surfaces you actively work in are SG-Builder and SG-Core → Media (plus SG-Modules → Shop if you are doing the optional commerce step). The others are flagged so you know they exist when you need them.

See also the SGEN quickstart for the foundational five-minute account-creation flow, and the portfolio tutorial, membership tutorial, and coaching tutorial for adjacent vertical builds.

Before you start

You need six things gathered before you begin. Each is a one-time collection; once you have them in a folder, the build is mechanical.

An SGEN account with at least the Launch tier active. The free trial covers the thirty-minute build.
Twelve to forty work images. JPG or WebP, exported at 2000 pixels on the long edge, color-corrected on a calibrated display if you have one. Artists who paint or work in physical media benefit from the larger upload size; the gallery lightbox shows the larger version on click.
A work-data spreadsheet. Per work: title, year, medium, dimensions (commonly inches in the US, centimeters elsewhere), edition info if applicable, and an optional one-sentence note. The gallery uses these fields as the caption strip below each image.
An artist statement. Two to four paragraphs covering the body of work, the working approach, and any conceptual through-line. Three hundred to six hundred words is the target. A bullet-style CV is not the artist statement; both have a place but the statement is what the bio page leads with.
An exhibitions list. Each entry: year, exhibition title, venue, city, and whether it was solo or group. Three to ten entries covering recent and upcoming. Career-spanning lists belong on a separate CV page that you can add in the second pass.
A headshot or studio shot. Square or three-by-four, 800 pixels on the long edge. A studio shot showing the artist with the work often outperforms a clean studio headshot for an artist site.

You do not need:

A custom domain on day one. The *.sgen.com preview URL is shareable from the moment step 8 finishes.
A logo. A typeset wordmark in your name (commonly first name space last name) is a strong default and the template includes one.
A separate ecommerce subscription. If you do the optional shop step, SGEN Shop covers print or original sales with Stripe checkout out of the box.

Where to find it

Every step in the build starts from one of these three URLs:

Step	URL	What lives here
1 (template)	`https://dashboard.sgen.com`	New-site flow, Artist Starter pick
2-7 (build)	`https://.sgen.com/sg-admin`	Per-site editor, pages, media, shop
8 (view)	`https://.sgen.com`	The live public artist site

Steps

Eight steps. The first six are the core build. Step seven is the optional shop. Step eight is the publish-and-view. Time budgets are per step; the total runs about thirty minutes for a first-time SGEN user with images and work data ready (closer to thirty-five if you do the optional shop).

1. Pick the Artist Starter template (≤ 3 minutes)

From SG-Dashboard, click Create New Site. The starter grid shows six templates; pick Artist Starter. The thumbnail shows a hero with a single work image at large size, a gallery grid below, and an exhibitions strip — that is the shape you will publish.

Name the site with your name as it appears in exhibition contexts (commonly first name space last name; some artists use a studio name like "Studio Aoki" but the personal-name pattern is the strong default for gallery discoverability). Accept the suggested preview subdomain or pick a shorter version. Click Create Site. SGEN provisions in about five seconds.

What you'll see at the end of step 1: SG-Admin loaded with the Artist Starter pages already in place — Home, Gallery, Exhibitions, Bio, Press, Contact, plus an optional placeholder Shop page that you decide whether to publish in step 7.

2. Upload your work images (≤ 6 minutes)

Click SG-Core → Media in the left sidebar. The media library opens with a single empty-state card and a large Upload Files button. Click it, then drag your twelve-to-forty work images and your headshot or studio shot into the drop zone.

Before clicking Upload Files in the modal, toggle Format: WebP and Compression: On. Both default off and the upload runs uncompressed without them. SGEN converts and compresses on the server side; the conversion takes about two seconds per image. For artist sites with large source images, expect the upload to take ninety seconds to three minutes depending on your connection.

When the upload finishes, the media library shows your images as a grid. Tag each work image with the work label and the headshot with the about label using the right-rail tag field. Click each work image once to open the metadata pane; fill in Title, Year, Medium, Dimensions, and optional Edition from your spreadsheet. These fields populate the gallery caption strip automatically in step 3.

If your spreadsheet is long, use the Bulk Edit button at the top of the media library. Select the work images, click Bulk Edit, paste the spreadsheet rows into the import field, and SGEN matches by filename. Match accuracy depends on filename consistency; rename files to match titles before the upload if you want clean automation.

What you'll see at the end of step 2: the media library with all uploaded images visible as thumbnails, each work image showing title, year, medium, and dimensions in the metadata pane, and the headshot tagged for the bio page.

3. Build the gallery with lightbox (≤ 6 minutes)

Click Pages → Gallery in the left sidebar. The Gallery page opens in SG-Builder with a placeholder twelve-tile grid. Click the Gallery Settings button in the right rail to set the gallery behavior before placing images.

In Gallery Settings, set the Layout to one of three options: Grid Equal (every tile the same size, strongest for series-based work), Grid Masonry (tiles size to image aspect ratio, strongest for mixed-orientation work), or Single Column (one image per row, full-bleed, strongest for large-scale paintings). Set the Lightbox toggle to On so clicking a tile opens the full image. Set Caption Style to Below Image (commonly preferred over hover-only captions for accessibility and gallery-context viewing).

Click the first tile to select it, then Replace Image in the right rail. The media picker opens. Filter by the work tag, click your first work image, and click Insert. The caption strip below the tile auto-populates from the metadata you set in step 2 (title, year, medium, dimensions). If a field looks wrong, fix it in the metadata pane in Media; the gallery refreshes.

Repeat for each tile. The template ships with twelve tiles; if you have more works, click Add Tile at the bottom of the grid until you reach your work count. If you have fewer, right-click unused tiles and Delete Tile.

If you work in series, group the gallery by series using Add Section Heading between groups. Each section gets its own heading (commonly the series title and year range) and its own subset of tiles. The section heading scrolls in place; the gallery does not paginate across sections.

What you'll see at the end of step 3: the Gallery page with your real images filling the grid in your chosen layout, captions reading title/year/medium/dimensions below each tile, lightbox opening cleanly on click, and section headings between series if your work is series-based.

4. Build the exhibitions timeline (≤ 4 minutes)

Click Pages → Exhibitions in the left sidebar. The Exhibitions page loads in SG-Builder with a timeline component already in place — a vertical strip of dated entries, most recent at the top, with venue and city per entry.

Click the first entry to select it. The right rail shows entry settings — year, exhibition title, venue, city, country (optional), solo or group toggle, and optional link target (commonly to the venue or the show's page). Paste your first entry from the exhibitions spreadsheet. Set the Solo/Group toggle correctly; the timeline renders solo entries with a distinct badge that signals career stage to galleries.

Repeat for each entry. The template ships with five timeline entries; add or remove via Add Entry and Delete Entry in the right rail. The strong default is three to ten entries covering recent and upcoming — career-spanning lists belong on a separate CV page in the second pass.

Add an "Upcoming" section heading above any future-dated entries using Add Section Heading. Upcoming shows are the strongest signal of current activity for a gallery or a press visit; surfacing them above past shows works better than burying them in chronological order.

What you'll see at the end of step 4: the Exhibitions page with three to ten real entries in reverse chronological order, solo and group correctly tagged, upcoming shows surfaced above past shows under an "Upcoming" heading, and optional venue links wired.

5. Write the Bio page — statement plus facts (≤ 4 minutes)

Click Pages → Bio. The Bio page loads in SG-Builder with a two-block layout — artist statement on top (a single text block) and a CV-style facts strip below (education, residencies, awards, collections).

Click the artist statement block and replace the placeholder with your prepared statement from the Before You Start step. The statement is the heart of the bio page; resist the urge to lead with a list of credentials. Galleries read the statement to decide whether to read further; collectors read the statement to decide whether to read at all.

In the right rail, set the Statement Width to Narrow (roughly 600 pixels) for comfortable reading length. Wider statement blocks read like marketing copy; narrow blocks read like a written statement. Avoid the marketing pattern of breaking the statement into bullets; statements belong in paragraphs.

In the facts strip below, replace the placeholder labels with your real categories — typically Education, Residencies, Awards, Collections, and optionally Teaching. Under each label, paste the list of entries (one per line). The template renders each as a clean list with year prefix where present.

Click the headshot placeholder at the top of the page and Replace Image in the right rail. Pick your tagged headshot or studio shot. The bio page is the only page on the site where the artist appears as a person; pick the image that respects both the artist and the work.

What you'll see at the end of step 5: the Bio page with your statement in your voice at a narrow width that reads as writing rather than marketing, a facts strip with your real categories and entries, and your headshot at the top.

6. Build the Press page (≤ 3 minutes)

Click Pages → Press. The Press page loads in SG-Builder with a placeholder six-block grid. Each block has space for a pull-quote, the publication name, the writer's byline, the date, and an optional link to the full piece.

Click the first block to select it. Paste a pull-quote (one to three sentences, the strongest line from the review) into the quote field. Fill the publication name (commonly italicized — the template handles italic styling), the writer's byline, and the publication date. Set the link target to the full review URL where available; for print-only or paywalled reviews, leave the link blank and add a "Print only" or "Paywalled" badge in the right rail.

Repeat for each press entry you have. If you have fewer than six entries, right-click unused blocks and Delete Block. Two strong press blocks outperform six thin ones; if you only have two genuine reviews, ship two. Generic blog mentions or aggregator listings are not press for this page — keep them for a separate "Mentions" section in the second pass.

If you have no press coverage yet (common for emerging artists), delete the Press page entirely from the sidebar using Pages → Press → ··· → Delete. The site renders cleanly without it. An empty Press page hurts more than a missing one; only ship the page when you have something to put on it.

What you'll see at the end of step 6: the Press page with two to six real pull-quotes, publication and byline correct, dates in reverse chronological order, working links to full pieces where available, and either Print Only badges for print-only coverage or no badge for digital coverage with live links.

7. Wire the Contact page and the optional Shop (≤ 4 minutes)

Click Pages → Contact. The Contact page loads with a four-field form: name, email, inquiry type, and message. The form is wired to deliver to the email on your account.

The Inquiry Type dropdown is the field that matters most for an artist contact form. The defaults are sensible: "Gallery inquiry," "Collector inquiry," "Press inquiry," "Studio visit request," and "Other." Edit the options to match your actual practice. If you route gallery inquiries to a separate inbox (commonly the case for represented artists routing to the gallery's contact), set the CC Recipient in the right rail per inquiry type using the Routing Rules panel.

Add a one-paragraph "How to reach me" note at the top of the form. Two or three sentences explaining what response times look like (commonly "Within one week" rather than promising twenty-four hours) and what kinds of inquiries are welcomed. Honesty here outperforms speed promises.

Optional shop step. If you are selling prints or available originals direct, click Pages → Shop. The Shop page loads with the SGEN Shop module installed and three placeholder product cards. Click each card and replace with a real product — title, edition info if applicable, price, shipping window, and primary image from the media library. Use the Add Product button to add additional editions or originals up to your full available inventory.

Connect Stripe under SG-Modules → Shop → Payment Processor if you have not already. Stripe handles checkout and routes funds to your connected bank account; the test-mode toggle lets you verify the flow with test cards before going live.

If you are not selling direct, delete the Shop page from the sidebar using Pages → Shop → ··· → Delete. The site renders cleanly without commerce.

What you'll see at the end of step 7: the Contact page with your routing rules confirmed, your honest response-time note at the top, and either the optional Shop page with two to six available works wired to Stripe checkout, or the Shop page deleted entirely if you are not selling direct.

8. Publish and view the live site (≤ 1 minute)

Return to Pages. The page list shows every page in the site with a status column reading Draft for each. Click the Publish All button at the top right of the page list. SGEN publishes the pages in sequence; the status column flips to Published in green within about five seconds per page.

Click View Site in the top right of SG-Admin. The live artist site opens in a new browser tab at https://.sgen.com. Click through the Home → Gallery (verify lightbox opens cleanly) → Exhibitions → Bio → Press → Contact flow to verify each page loads with your real content.

Open the same URL on your phone. The template is responsive out of the box; the gallery reflows to two columns on tablet and one column on phone, the lightbox respects the mobile viewport, the exhibitions timeline stacks cleanly, and the bio statement remains readable.

If you wired the optional Shop, run one test purchase with a Stripe test card to verify the checkout flow, the shipping window calculation, and the confirmation email. Cancel the test order from the Stripe dashboard so inventory restores.

What you'll see at the end of step 8: a live artist site at your *.sgen.com preview URL, six published pages (or seven with the optional Shop), a working gallery with lightbox, a clean exhibitions timeline, a bio that reads in your voice, press where applicable, a working contact form with routing rules, and an optional shop taking real orders if wired.

What success looks like

You finish the build with eight concrete artifacts:

A live artist site at https://.sgen.com, publicly accessible
A gallery showing twelve to forty real works with clean captions and lightbox open-on-click
An exhibitions timeline with three to ten entries, solo and group tagged correctly, upcoming shows surfaced
A bio page with your artist statement at readable width plus a CV-style facts strip
A press page with two to six real pull-quotes (or no press page if no coverage yet)
A contact page with inquiry-type routing matching your real practice and an honest response-time note
An optional shop with two to six available editions or originals wired to Stripe (or no shop if not selling direct)
A responsive site that respects the work on phone, tablet, and desktop

If you can send the live URL to a gallery contact who has never seen your work, and they can navigate from Home through the gallery, read your statement, see your exhibitions history, and reach you via the right inquiry type — and the inquiry lands in the right inbox — the build worked. That is the verification.

Variations

Seven adaptations of the base build, each suited to a specific artist-site shape.

Series-based gallery with section headings. In step 3, use Add Section Heading between groups of tiles to separate series. Each section heading carries the series title, year range, and an optional one-paragraph series statement. The gallery scrolls in place; visitors browse by series rather than by individual work.

Single-work-per-page deep dives for large-scale or installation work. In step 3, set the Gallery Layout to Single Column and add a one-paragraph note below each image describing material, context, or process. Strongest for sculpture, installation, and large-scale painting where a tile grid would compress the work too aggressively.

Studio-visit booking alongside the contact form. Add a Booking page using Add Page → Booking and wire it to your calendar. Set the booking type to Studio Visit (90 minutes) with limited availability windows. Gallery and collector studio-visit requests route to the booking flow rather than the contact form, reducing back-and-forth.

CV page separate from the bio statement. In the second pass, add a CV page with the full career-spanning exhibitions list, complete bibliography, full collections list, and any teaching or curatorial work. Link to it from the bio page; the bio page stays focused on the statement, the CV page absorbs the career-spanning data.

Color-critical work needing high-fidelity image rendering. In step 2, after upload, visit SG-Modules → Media Settings and set the global image-rendering preference to High Fidelity (no recompression on display). The default re-renders for speed; high-fidelity preserves color but trades a few hundred milliseconds of load time. Most galleries respect the tradeoff.

Print-on-demand integration for editions. In the optional Shop step, instead of fulfilling prints yourself, connect a print-on-demand partner under SG-Modules → Shop → Fulfillment Integrations. Orders route directly to the printer with your standardized file specs; you never touch shipping. Works best for editions where you have already approved the printer's color accuracy.

Mailing list signup for show announcements. Add a small mailing-list signup block to the Home page footer using Add Block → Email Capture. Connect to your existing mailing-list provider (Mailchimp, Buttondown, Substack) or use the built-in SGEN mailing list. Show announcements (openings, new editions, studio sales) go to the list four to six times a year, keeping galleries and collectors loosely engaged.

Common pitfalls

Four things go wrong most often during an artist build. Each has a one-step fix.

Work images load slowly or show recompression artifacts on the live site. Re-check that Compression: On and Format: WebP were toggled during the upload in step 2. If the images were uploaded with defaults (Compression Off, Format Original), the file sizes are too large and the CDN serves slowly. Open the media library, select all work images, and click Re-process with WebP in the toolbar. For color-critical work where compression artifacts are visible, switch to High Fidelity rendering as described in the variations above.

The gallery caption strip shows blank fields under some tiles. This means those work images do not have title, year, medium, and dimensions filled in the media metadata. Open SG-Core → Media, click each work with a blank caption, and fill the metadata pane. The gallery refreshes within five seconds; the captions populate from the metadata, not from anything entered in SG-Builder directly.

The exhibitions timeline reverses order (oldest first). Open the Exhibitions page, click Sort Settings in the right rail, and set Order to Reverse Chronological (most recent first). The template ships with this set correctly but a save can sometimes flip it; verify after every major edit.

The contact form delivers to spam, especially gallery inquiries from unfamiliar domains. First-time deliveries from a new .sgen.com subdomain sometimes land in spam until the receiving inbox marks the sender as safe. Send yourself a test submission, mark it as Not Spam, and subsequent submissions deliver to inbox. For represented artists routing to a gallery inbox, ask the gallery to whitelist the .sgen.com domain on receipt of the first test message.

Examples

Three real-shape artist builds, one per primary artist profile.

Example A — Mid-career painter (Studio Aoki)

Reina is a working oil painter with eight years of gallery shows and a current body of work in a landscape series. She picks the Artist Starter, uploads thirty-two work images (all from the current series and the prior series), groups the gallery by series with section headings ("Hollow Mountain 2024-2025" and "Quiet Coast 2022-2023"), writes a 450-word statement, lists eight exhibitions (one solo upcoming, three past solos, four group), pastes four press pull-quotes from her last two shows, sets contact routing with gallery inquiries to her dealer and collector inquiries to her studio inbox, and ships in twenty-nine minutes. Skips the shop — represented work routes through the gallery.

Example B — Printmaker with edition sales (Hart Press)

Daniel is a printmaker working in screenprint and letterpress, selling editions direct to collectors. He picks the Artist Starter, uploads eighteen work images plus eight detail shots, sets the gallery to masonry layout (his work mixes orientations), writes a 320-word statement on his process, lists six exhibitions, skips press (no coverage yet), wires the optional shop with twelve available editions (each tied to its gallery image), connects Stripe in live mode, and ships in thirty-three minutes. First print sells within two weeks of his launch announcement to his existing mailing list.

Example C — Emerging sculptor (Maya Cline Studio)

Maya is an emerging sculptor working in mixed materials, two years out of graduate school, building toward first gallery representation. She picks the Artist Starter, uploads sixteen work images (her full graduate thesis body plus four post-graduate pieces), uses single-column layout for the gallery (her sculptures need full-bleed presentation), writes a 380-word statement, lists four exhibitions (two group shows, one upcoming open studio, one graduate thesis show), deletes the press page (no coverage yet), sets contact routing with one inquiry type ("Gallery inquiry") to her primary inbox, skips the shop, and ships in twenty-six minutes. Sends the URL with cold outreach to five galleries in week one; gets one studio-visit request.

Why the thirty-minute target works

The thirty-minute target is honest, not marketing. Internal timing runs on an artist build with prepared images and work data consistently land between twenty-seven and thirty-four minutes for a first-time SGEN user (excluding the optional shop step) and between nineteen and twenty-five minutes for an operator who has shipped one artist site already. The variance lives in three steps.

Step 2 (media upload plus metadata) varies the most. Twelve to forty work images at 2000 pixels on the long edge upload in about two to four minutes on a steady connection; the metadata fill takes another two to four minutes depending on whether you used bulk edit. If you know your connection is slow or your filenames do not match titles cleanly, plan an extra five minutes here.

Step 5 (bio statement) varies the second-most. The build assumes the statement is written; if you write it during the build, plan a separate session. Statement writing under build-session time pressure produces worse statements; galleries notice.

Step 7 (optional shop) is genuinely optional. If you skip the shop, the build runs about twenty-six minutes. If you wire the shop with three to six products and a Stripe connection, plan an extra five to eight minutes — that is the variance between a thirty-minute build and a thirty-five-minute build.

If any single step runs longer than its target by more than fifty percent, stop and check: you are usually solving a different problem than the build (writing the statement, debating which works to include, photographing missing pieces). Pause the build, finish the off-build task, and return.

After the build — second and third passes

The thirty-minute build is the publish step. Second and third passes are where the artist site sharpens.

Second pass (recommended: same week, 30-60 minutes):

Add a full CV page separate from the bio statement. The bio page stays focused on the statement; the CV page carries the complete career-spanning exhibitions list, bibliography, collections, residencies, awards, and teaching.
Review the gallery sequence one more time. The first three works set the read; verify those three are the strongest and that they show range without confusing visitors about the body of work.
Set up the SGEN Analytics dashboard so you see which works draw the most lightbox opens — that data shapes which works to lead with on outreach.
Send the live URL to two or three artist peers for feedback before any gallery or press outreach. Peer review catches voice issues you cannot see from inside the build.

Third pass (recommended: when you have a real domain, 15-30 minutes):

Point your custom domain at the site. the admin → Settings → Domains. Add the domain (commonly firstnamelastname dot com), copy the two DNS records, paste them at your registrar, wait for propagation.
Add a favicon — the admin → Settings → Site Identity → Favicon Upload. A typeset wordmark of your initials reads as professional in a browser tab.
Set up the mailing-list signup if you skipped it on first pass. Galleries and collectors who visit and do not inquire are still warm leads for show announcements.
Add per-page OG images for the Gallery, Bio, and any active exhibition page. The OG image is what shows when the URL is shared in messaging or social; a strong OG image converts shared links to visitors.

What's next — pick your second read

The artist site is shipped. Pick one of three second reads depending on what comes next:

You want to add a workshop-or-talk series for educator-income alongside the art practice. Read the coaching tutorial for the booking and intake flow.
You want to add a paid newsletter or subscriber-only studio updates. Read the membership tutorial for the tier and gating flow.
You want richer commerce — variable shipping rates by region, custom packaging notes, bulk-order workflows for galleries buying multiple pieces. Read the Shop module reference for the commerce-feature surfaces.

What to do if it does not work

The gallery does not appear on the published site. Confirm the Gallery page is set to Published (not Draft) in the admin → Pages. If the page is published but blank, check that at least one media item has been assigned to the Gallery block — an empty block does not render placeholder UI in production.

The press pull-quotes show placeholder text after publishing. Pull-quote blocks require the Quote and Attribution fields to be filled in SG-Builder. Open the page in SG-Builder, click the pull-quote block, fill both fields, save, and republish.

The optional shop does not appear in the navigation. The Shop page is conditional — it is only added to the navigation automatically if the Ecommerce module is activated and at least one product is marked Available. Check the admin → Store → Products for availability status and confirm the Ecommerce module is active under Settings → Modules.

Guides

Reference

Changelog

Roadmap