Sherborne House Arts

The team at Wired Canvas all come from fine art backgrounds, so we are particularly interested in designing websites for art galleries, arts organisations and the creative industries. Sherborne House Arts (SHA) develops and curates the visual arts programme at Sherborne House in Dorset. Currently the house is undergoing restoration, so in the mean time SHA are working around Dorset in non-gallery spaces; curating contemporary visual arts exhibitions and projects.

Their old website was no longer flexible enough for the wide variety of projects that Sherborne House Arts are involved in. They required something dynamic and informative that could handle a range of multimedia, as well as maintain audience engagement whilst they are away from their ‘physical’ home. It also needed to provide an easily accessible archive of their work for future reference.

We worked with SHA and their existing branding to develop a WordPress-powered CMS solution, allowing them to take full control of updating their website. The website features large header slideshows and big images to reflect SHA’s lively visual arts programme, and seamlessly formats media content with no coding skills required. We also built a newsletter sign-up form into every page of the website to collect visitors details for the mailing list.

Sherborne House was also home to ‘The White Room’; artist meetings for discussion about current art events, news and issues. SHA wanted to translate these meetings into an online format, so we integrated online members forums and a bespoke ‘White Room’ section for feature articles and comment sections.

Since SHA are currently working across a variety of venues, including open-air events such as B-Side Multimedia Arts Festival, it was important that the site be fully accessible from a variety of platforms including smartphones and tablets (eg. iPad). Therefore we developed a simple ‘responsive’ design that reformats itself to fit different screen widths and shows only the essential information on mobiles – so the website is quick to load even on 3G connections. This keeps it fast and easy to access, whether from your laptop or your mobile phone.