Most artists know how to spring clean a studio. The rags come out, the shelves get sorted, and a box of abandoned experiments finally goes to the recycling. The website rarely gets the same treatment. Yet a portfolio site is a working space too, and it accumulates things: draft pieces you meant to finish, a bio written before your last two exhibitions, a contact form that stopped working sometime in the autumn.

You do not need a redesign. You need an hour or two, a cup of tea and a willingness to be slightly ruthless. This is a seasonal audit you can run every spring, or every spring and autumn if you are organised. Work through it in whatever order suits you, but do not skip the first section. Everything else depends on it.

Start with the work, not the website

Before you touch a font or a colour, decide what actually belongs on the site. Portfolios grow by accumulation rather than decision: each new piece gets added, nothing ever gets removed, and after five years the gallery page reads like a storage cupboard.

Open your work page on a laptop, then on your phone. Scroll slowly. Notice which images make you pause with interest and which ones you scroll past without registering. Notice the pieces you have kept up out of politeness to a past version of yourself.

If you could only show eight pieces to a gallery, an art director or a buyer, which eight would they be? That question is the whole audit in miniature. Most visitors will look at three or four images before deciding whether to keep reading, so the order of your work is doing more work than the quantity of it.

A quick test for each piece

• Relevance: Does it represent the work you want to be commissioned, exhibited or hired for now, not three years ago?
• Image quality: In focus, evenly lit, straight-on, no distracting background clutter. A decent photograph of a modest piece beats a poor photograph of a strong one.
• Captions: Title, year, medium and dimensions. If it hangs in a show or lives in a collection, say so plainly.
• Consistency: Do your images sit together as a body of work, or do the crops and colour temperatures jump around?

On file size: export around 1,600 to 2,000 pixels on the longest edge, and check the results on a phone screen in daylight. Over-saturated edits look dramatic on a laptop and muddy on a handset, so keep your adjustments modest.

Rewrite the bio while you still remember the details

Bios age faster than anything else on a website. Read yours aloud. If it begins with a claim about having always been passionate about something, start again. Passions are not evidence; work is.

Split the two documents properly. A bio is factual and short: where you are based, what you make, the materials or processes you use, a handful of genuine exhibition or project credits, and what you are available for. A statement is about intent: the questions, materials and decisions behind the work. Keep the statement between roughly 100 and 250 words, written in the present tense, and make sure it describes the work on the site rather than a piece you made in 2018.

First person or third person is a matter of taste, but be consistent. And keep a longer version of your bio in a plain text file on your computer, so that the next time a gallery or magazine asks, you are not writing it from scratch at midnight.

Hunt down the broken things

Nothing undermines a portfolio faster than a dead link. Broken things are invisible to you because you never click them; visitors find them immediately. Set aside twenty minutes and click everything, on desktop and on mobile.

1. Send yourself a test message through the contact form, and check the reply-to address works.
2. Click every social icon, press mention, external exhibition link and downloadable CV or PDF.
3. Play any embedded video to the end, or replace it with a still image.
4. Test every shop, commission or enquiry button through to the confirmation screen.
5. Check that your email address, studio location and any opening hours are current.

If you sell work, take commissions or run workshops, make sure your terms, shipping information, returns policy and privacy details are clear and easy to find. If you are unsure where you stand on contracts, tax or consumer rules, that is a job for a qualified professional rather than a website checklist.

The details visitors feel but rarely notice

Presentation problems rarely get complained about; they just quietly reduce trust. Check the small things: body text large enough to read comfortably, line lengths that do not stretch across a wide monitor, enough contrast between text and background, and captions that are not in pale grey on white.

Keep your thumbnail grid consistent. If every image on the page shares one aspect ratio, the page reads as calm and deliberate; mixed ratios read as accidental. Use plain navigation labels — Work, About, Exhibitions, Contact — and avoid clever ones that make people guess.

Write page titles and descriptions in ordinary language, the way you would describe your practice to someone at a private view. Then look at loading speed: if a page takes several seconds to appear on a phone, compress those images before doing anything else.

A portfolio is not a monument. It is the current state of a conversation, and conversations change.

Keep it seasonal rather than ceremonial

Big rebuilds rarely happen. Small, regular passes do. Put two dates in your calendar each year, one in spring and one in autumn, and treat them as maintenance rather than reinvention.

On each pass, do four things: remove one piece you have outgrown, add one recent piece, reread the bio, and click every link. Anything more ambitious — a new layout, a shop, a newsletter — can wait until you have a genuine reason for it.

Finally, note what you changed in a document or a notebook. Next spring, when you wonder whether the site is looking tired, you will be able to see exactly what you did last time and how far your work has moved since. That record is often more useful than the tidy-up itself.

Photo: Ylanite / Pixabay