A gallery that updates its own website

What it is

A demo, and it says so at the top of its own page. Art Gallery Malta is not a real gallery: we invented a contemporary gallery on Old Bakery Street in Valletta and built it the website it would get for the Business price. It’s live, and so is the admin area, so you can go in and change the site yourself.

What’s inside it

• The collection, filtered. Every work the gallery has on the walls, with a filter for painting, sculpture, photography and mixed media. Tap one and you get the artist, the year, the medium, the size, the price and a button that opens an email already written about that piece.
• A journal. Articles the gallery writes itself — studio visits, advice on buying a first piece, buildings in Valletta worth looking up at. This is the blog every business is told it needs and then never gets to update.
• A front page the gallery controls. The big photo, the headline, the sentence under it, the button — none of that is fixed in the code. It’s typed into a form.
• The admin area is the point. Sign in and you can add a work, upload its photo, mark it sold, write an article, change the opening hours or the phone number. It’s the same site your customers see, edited from a page only you can open.
• Photos upload from your phone. Pick the picture, it goes up, it’s on the website. No file names, no folders, nothing to send to anyone.
• Set up so Google understands it. Every page has its own title and description, and each artwork and article is marked up properly — as a work of art, as an article — so search results show them as what they are.

Go and try it. The dark strip at the top of the demo has a link into the admin, and the password is filled in for you. Change anything you like: an hour after your first edit the site quietly puts itself back the way it was.

Why it matters for your website

This is the middle build, and the difference is one thing: you stop asking someone else to change your own website. A gallery hangs new work every few weeks. A restaurant changes its menu. A shop gets new stock. If every one of those changes needs an email to a developer, the website goes stale within a month, and a stale website is worse than a plain one.

It doesn’t have to be art. The same shape works for a menu, a property list, a stock room, a team page or a news section. Things that come in, get shown, and go out again.

The build and the care plan

This is the Business build, running on Care Plus: the domain, the hosting, the maintenance, and email at the gallery’s own name — hello@artgallerymalta.com, not a free address. A gallery writes to collectors, so the address it writes from matters.

Note

This one is a demo we built to show the Business tier, not paid client work and not a real gallery. The artists, the works and the prices are invented. It’s live, so click through and try it. Client sites take these slots as they launch.