In the digital era, new gallerists are faced with a question: should they focus on finding an address, or a web domain?

It's a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. You need a gallery to build a reputation, but you need a reputation before you can afford a gallery. Somewhere in between those two sits a website, quietly being the answer. 

I come from a family of four with multiple business ventures between us. Over the years, working in most of those businesses taught me a skill that’s both my greatest strength and my biggest weakness: being a ‘one-man show’.

When I moved to Denmark and had to write a CV for the first time in my life, I started listing all the things I knew how to do. At one point I felt strangely proud of just how long that list had become, even if it was getting a bit ridiculous.

Looking specifically at my work as a gallerist, I had to think about everything I had contributed to the successful running of an art institution. I started as a gallerist, but the list kept growing. Somewhere along the way, I’d become a salesperson, graphic designer, website manager, social media manager, logistics coordinator, packer, driver, cleaner, copywriter, PR person, sponsor-seeker, curator, exhibition technician, client liaison, event coordinator, and whatever else I needed to become. That’s just how small businesses work.

Of course, anyone who runs their own business ends up wearing many hats. You have to learn quickly, adapt constantly and always stay on top of whatever needs to be done. When everything depends on you - you simply have to make it work.

So when my partner and I decided to start working towards opening our own gallery in Denmark, I immediately started dreaming. I imagined large spaces, big windows, lots of natural light, promotional poster designs, exhibition concepts, opening receptions - all the wonderful things that come with the job.

But the more we talked about it, the clearer it became that maybe we’re not quite ready for a location with an actual address.

We’re new to the city. We don’t know many people yet, we don’t have many connections and we’re still finding our footing. Not to mention that rent is expensive and we’d have to start selling artworks almost immediately just to make ends meet. Doing that without an established network or a place in the local art scene is no easy task.

Waiting until we could afford a physical gallery never really felt like an option. If we're serious about this, we need to start building something now - not in a year's time, not when we know more people, not when we've saved enough for rent. The question became: what do we do?

We wanted to work. We wanted to present artworks, build relationships with artists and start selling. We already have a large collection of exlibris graphics in our possession and an idea of the artists we'd like to represent. But how do you do any of that without a physical gallery?

These days, it feels like almost everything starts online. Before people visit you, they Google you. They look you up, seek your online footprint. Do you exist? What are you?

So when figuring out what to focus on first - finding an address, or securing a domain, I thought to myself - a few years ago, I probably (definitely) would've said the walls should be the first step. A gallery needs a space, doesn't it? Somewhere people can walk in, look around, have a conversation. Feel the art, experience it. That’s how it should be. But the more we talked about it, the more I realised that maybe, nowadays, a gallery begins working long before anyone hangs the first painting.

An online gallery (a website) might be where we can showcase artworks, create artist profiles, write articles about art and slowly start building the foundation that will eventually grow into a physical gallery. A virtual space where we can begin working with artists, connecting with collectors and, hopefully, making our first sales.

Now comes the interesting question: how does someone with a variety of gallery-related skills, but absolutely no experience in web development, build a website?

It’s funny how every time I think I've finally collected all the skills I could possibly need, life hands me another one.

Thankfully, these days almost anyone can create a basic website using platforms with ready-to-use templates. It’s something I’ve never done before and honestly - I have very little idea what I’m doing. But by the end of it, this might just become another small addition to my collection of “things I’m kinda good at.”

So I started.

It didn’t take long before I realised that building a website requires a very different kind of patience. I’m used to moving things around freely in Adobe Illustrator, where if something doesn’t look right, you just drag it somewhere else. Website builders don’t work like that, so in a way I had to retrain my muscle memory. I once spent almost an hour trying tofigure out how to move a heading and a button to the lower-left corner of the homepage banner. Another time I spent two days building pages on one platform before admitting that it just wasn’t going to work for what we needed. So I started over. Again. And then again.

I’d like to think that that’s part of the process. Every new venture comes with its own learning curve… you just don’t always expect it to take form of a call-to-action button that refuses to move.

Don’t get me wrong - If I had the budget, I’d happily pay a professional. I don’t think of myself as ‘good enough to do anything’ - I know what I’m good at and when I need to let a professional take over. But right now unfortunately we have to pinch every øre we can.

So what should an online gallery actually look like?
This is where the fun begins.

You get to decide what your website looks like - what pages it has, what information goes where and which artworks you want to present. It helps that I’ve worked with gallery websites before and already know what worked well, what didn’t and what I’d like to improve.

Our vision is fairly simple: We want visitors to be able to browse all available artworks using categories and filters. If you’re looking for an abstract painting with yellow tones - you shouldn’t have to scroll through pages of sculptures, graphic prints, drawings and everything else.

One thing I always noticed on some galleries’ websites was how frustrating it could be to search for something specific online. If someone knows they’re looking, shouldn’t it be made to be as easy as possible to get them from A to B - from product to cart? We want people to spend time looking at the art - not searching for navigation buttons.

We also want dedicated artist pages where visitors can explore an artist’s available works and learn a little more about them. Because buying art isn’t just about buying an object - it’s also about getting to know the person behind it.

And finally, we’d like to tell the story of Largo - how a gallery that started in Bulgaria is now beginning a new chapter, with roots in two different countries.

Simple, right? Well... almost.

Even with templates, building a website takes an incredible amount of time and patience. You want things to look and behave a certain way, but templates don’t always bend to your vision. And those build-in AI assistants - they’re not nearly as helpful as they’re probably supposed to be. More often than not, they make things even more complicated. You give it a prompt - it deletes your whole page. Nice.

Still, after enough trial and error, you eventually end up with something you can start filling with artworks and stories.

Then comes the next challenge — Marketing.

Social media. Ads. Newsletters. Finding ways for people to actually discover that your business exists. Building the website is one thing, but convincing someone to actually visit it is another. That's the part that feels slightly terrifying, especially when you don’t really know how the algorithm works and ot top of that - apparently it changes  e v e r y d a y.

Nowadays it feels like no matter how much you optimise your website for search engines, if you don’t pay for advertising - you’re unlikely to appear anywhere near the first page of Google. And even if you do pay, you’re often competing with someone else’s ads.

None of this is what I imagined when I pictured opening a gallery. I wasn't dreaming about responsive layouts and SEOs. I was dreaming about exhibitions, opening receptions, and drinking cheap wine with patrons while gushing over paintings. But maybe this is simply what building a gallery looks like in 2026.