A painter's website: 31 artworks with up-to-date status, and he maintains it

The Pérez Palermo website is the catalog website of Julián Andrés Pérez Palermo, a painter from Mercedes, in Buenos Aires province, Argentina. It brings together 31 original works on canvas and paper, filterable by period, each with its own page and its status always in view. And he maintains the catalog himself: he adds, changes and deletes works without depending on anyone.

Here I explain how I approached it, what decisions I made and why, for anyone with a similar project.

What was the problem to solve?

An artist sells one-of-a-kind pieces. When a painting sells, it's gone, and there's no identical one to restock. That defines almost everything else. The buyer needs to know at a glance what's still available, and the work has to be shown with the care of a gallery, not as just another product in a generic store.

There was a third condition, less visible but just as important: the body of work changes. There are new paintings, others sell, others go out to an exhibition. A website that depended on me for every change would be out of date in no time.

How do you organize a painter's work?

Like an exhibition: by rooms. Pérez Palermo's work has very distinct stages, so the catalog is filtered by period: Hyperrealist (9 works), Figurative (6), Abstract (8) and Exhibitions (8). Someone looking for the hyperrealism goes straight there, without scrolling through everything else.

The home page, on the other hand, doesn't show everything. It opens with a single featured work, with a curatorial text introducing it, and a carousel with 7 more. It's the first impression: one large, well-presented piece before any grid.

Why a page for each artwork?

Because that's what a wall label does in a museum: it gives each piece its place. Each work has its own page, with medium, size, production date, a text by the artist about the piece and either the price or 'price on request', depending on the work.

It also has an effect you don't see: each artwork page has its own URL and is in the sitemap, the list that tells Google which pages exist. Thirty-one works are thirty-one pages with their own text, instead of a single photo gallery a search engine can't read. I went deeper into this in how to sell art online.

How do you show whether a work is available?

With a colored dot under each work. Green for available, red for sold, ochre for reserved, and a fourth status, on exhibition, for pieces hanging in a show. It's in the grid and on the artwork page, always in view.

Sold works don't disappear: they stay in the catalog as part of the artist's body of work, marked as sold. At the time of writing, of the 31 works, 18 are listed as available. Visitors know that without asking. I explained how to think about those statuses for any catalog in online art catalog.

What does a painter's website design look like?

The brief was: a gallery, not a store. Gray walls, each work framed in a white mat, titles in italic serif like an exhibition wall label, and plenty of space around everything. The interface uses a discreet grotesque sans-serif so it doesn't compete.

The color rule was strict: the only strong colors on the site are the paintings and the small status dot. Everything else is gray, white and black. If the design draws attention, it takes attention away from the work.

How does the artist maintain it?

The website has a panel where he manages his catalog. He adds new works, edits existing ones, deletes the ones he wants to remove and changes the status of each piece. When a painting sells or goes out to an exhibition, he updates it himself in a minute, and the site reflects it.

For me this was the most important part of the project. An artist's website that depends on the developer to mark a work as sold ends up showing works that are no longer there. I cover what should be editable and what shouldn't in a website you can update yourself.

What's under the hood?

• Mobile-first. That's where a link arriving over WhatsApp, the main messaging app in Argentina, gets opened most. I checked it on a phone screen: the catalog and artwork pages are comfortable to browse.
• Its own URL for each artwork, in the sitemap, so search engines find every piece.
• Strict security headers (CSP), which limit what can be loaded on the page.
• About and Contact sections, with WhatsApp, Instagram and email in the footer.

What did I take away from this project?

That the same idea works far beyond art. Anyone who sells unique units has the same problem: the customer wants to know what's available, and the owner needs to update it without asking anyone's permission. A catalog with status works for a used car dealership, a real estate agency or a custom furniture maker, with the same structure: a page per unit, a visible status and a panel of their own.

If you're an artist thinking about your website, in artist portfolio website I put together which pages it needs. And if you want to know what it means in numbers, the 2026 ranges for Argentina are in how much a website costs.

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