It is important to present your work in a way that you are proud of when you are forming your online presence, which mostly covers any social media platforms that are used, and a personal website.
A fluent, cohesive style across multiple platforms can be a crucial tool to ensure that an audience, gallery, or potential clients are able to draw a clear link between your different online presences, for them to know they are accessing the correct platforms for your work.
In my case, there are many other people who share my name, so I need to make sure that my platforms can be correctly associated with one another. When choosing an Instagram handle I was unable to use @marylawler as this was already taken by someone else. I instead initially decided to use @maryelizalawler for the first year of using my account, yet later decided to change this to @maryelawler as I felt that the previous name was too long.
When it came to choosing a domain name for my website, my first choice was to use www.marylawler.com, as this is the general format used by the majority of artists or photographers, as it is the most simple format to use as most photographers use their names to brand themselves with. Unfortunately this domain was already taken, so I looked at other options, starting with either www.maryelawler.com which would match my instagram handle, or www.marylawler.photo, yet I felt as though the former might not be something I would want to continue to market myself with throughout my whole career, and the latter appeared unprofessional as none of the other photographer's websites I had visited had used thin format in their domain.
I then realised that I was still able to use a .co.uk extension within my domain, so decided that the best domain name to use would be www.marylawler.co.uk as this is the simplest and most direct domain format, as it uses my name and the .co.uk extension is a better choice as I am a UK based artist which makes it clear to my audience that they are viewing my work.
As for the connection between online platforms, I have strengthened this through having a link to my Instagram profile on my website's navigation bar, and vice versa through having my website link in my Instagram bio, allowing the audience to easily navigate across the different platforms.
