Art Institute Canada is a bilingual website which is “dedicated to making Canadian art history a contemporary conversation “. And they more than succeed with wonderful stories filled with great historical and contemporary images of some of the best Canadian artists at work.
Art Institute Canada is a throwback – it is written in straightforward HTML5 showing what good CSS styling and use of image, video, and audio tools can achieve. Every page has a well chosen selection of images, slides or videos that tell each artist’s story.
For example the home page slider show above has a link to each of the website’s major sections: a featured artists story, the library of biographies of the artists, the Canadian art dictionary, and commentary about a specific Canadian’s art work. And inside the website provides excellent navigation:
Here is a portfolio of books about some renowned Canadian artists, 30 to be exact. Each portfolio image links to a detailed biography with revealing images of the artist’s progression in subject and drawing styles. Yes, the choice of who is featured is limited to the critical luminaries of Canadian artistics scene. For example, Wikipedia listing for just the Canadian artists of the 20th Century has 478 artist with links to their websites.
Art Canada Institute is using more web media and in novel ways. There are now podcast available among the critics commentaries. Likewise videos popup throughout the website. This allows website writers more latitude in their stories about works of arts and artists.
So even though the website is chock full of large, full width sliders, images and videos, the website earns Website.Grader scores of 24/30 for speed, 30/30 for mobile readiness, 30/30 for SEO status, and 10/10 for security adding up to an overall website rating of 94/100. This is top notch. Even more impressive, Art Institute Canada has 82 domains pointing to the website with over 600o backlinks. Truly a feast for artists Canadian and worldwide.
And why not? Every page does Canadian artists featured therein very proud. And for many of the artists there are detailed biographies featuring essays, images, and often a video summary. In sum the Canadian painting art scene is well represented here so it begs the question – why no glimpses of other Canadian artists like sculptors or poets or musicians?