Yola comes first here because the pages a shop actually needs are ready-made blocks: a gallery per artist, a pricing section for the shop minimum, an FAQ for policies, and a contact form you fill in rather than design. No design experience needed. Pricing starts at $9.95/mo, and the free plan lets you build a portfolio page and look at it on a phone before paying, which suits a studio that would rather run its own site than wait on someone else for every small edit.
Yes. You can edit page titles, meta descriptions and page URLs yourself, which is what a search for a style plus a city rewards, and you can put the address, hours and walk-in policy on the contact page. Sites are mobile-optimized, so the layout adjusts on a phone without you keeping a second version. It doesn't replace a Google Business Profile, so claim that separately and point it at the new site.
Usually yes. People settle on an artist and a style before they settle on a shop, so one mixed gallery makes them do the sorting. A page per artist, with their own gallery, the styles they take and whether their books are open, answers that in one tap. It also gives each artist a link they can put in their own bio, which is where most of the traffic starts anyway.
Lead with galleries split by artist, the shop minimum and hourly rate in writing, your deposit and aftercare policy, and the age and ID requirements. Then a consultation form that asks for placement, size, budget and a link to references, so your first reply moves things forward. For a walkthrough of setting up form fields, Yola's help center covers it step by step.
Yes, and this is the thing to test before committing to any builder. On Yola you open the page, drop new photos into the gallery block, add the guest artist's name and dates, and republish. There's no request queue and nobody in the middle. Worth knowing up front: there's no social feed block, so that page is one you edit rather than a feed that updates itself.
Yes. Yola's free plan covers one website with two pages, 100 MB of storage, basic AI and self-service support, which is enough for a portfolio page and a contact page. Paid plans start at $9.95/mo and add the full AI tools, plus the room a page per artist needs. Among the others here, Wix and Strikingly both have free plans that carry their own branding, GoDaddy's free plan can't connect a custom domain, and Squarespace gives you 14 days before $19.00/mo.
It's the first thing to get right. Most of your traffic taps through from Instagram on a phone, so a gallery that needs pinching, or a contact button sitting below three screens of text, costs you the request. A mobile-optimized site adjusts on its own, so photos stay sharp and buttons stay tappable at any screen size. Yola's help center has guidance on checking a page at different screen sizes before you publish.
It depends on how much you want to run yourself. Both are genuinely close on setup speed, and both handle consultation scheduling inside the platform, so if booking on the site is your priority either one is a fair pick. Yola fits better when the priority is a portfolio by artist you can keep current without design work: the blocks are already built, and it starts at $9.95/mo with a free plan, against $19.00/mo and a trial only on Squarespace. Wix also expects you to adjust the mobile layout by hand after the desktop build, which is real work on pages made mostly of photos.