A short history of who builds arts websites

I made a fancy widget, and this post is my excuse to put it somewhere. You’ll have to scroll down to see it.

If you can delay gratification for just a moment, though, I’ll tell you a quick story.

When agencies ruled the land

Once upon a time, if you were an arts organisation in need of a website, you hired someone to build it.

Your budget dictated whether that was a friend’s cousin, a small agency, or a bigger outfit packed with talented specialists. Some agencies started specialising in the particular nuances (some imagined, some real) of arts and culture organisations.

Agencies wanting to break into this glamorous, riches-filled sector often cut their teeth on smaller work (maybe an independent or touring theatre, or a microsite or exhibition interactive) before anyone needing a serious ticketing integration would take a chance on them.

Then the DIY website builders arrived

Platforms like Squarespace and Wix came along and took a bite out of the smallest end of the market. For a lot of people, decent templates with a bit of customisation were good enough, and for a small annual fee, the price was right.

The agencies didn’t mind too much, because that end of the market was never particularly profitable anyway. But it was where newcomers got their start, so the way into the sector got a little narrower.

Website-as-a-service came on the scene

Next came platforms built for the sector, such as Basker, carbonhouse, CultureSuite, Loop, Saffire and Simpleview.

Some have been around for a while. Others are newer upstarts built by agencies with sector experience who saw the value in a different model. They’d probably been casting envious eyes at ticketing platforms and collections management systems, with their single codebase and subscription income.

The sales pitch is that, for an annual subscription, you get far more functionality for your budget than you might otherwise. You might lose a little flexibility and portability, but that’s the trade-off.

And now there’s agentic coding (or vibe-coding)

AI tools like Claude, Codex, Lovable and Replit give a reasonably handy person the means to knock together something simple (or not so simple). They also supercharge what in-house teams are capable of producing.

That probably means more competition at the lower end. Or maybe the speed of production makes smaller jobs worth outsourcing again, and the way in widens back up a bit. It could also leave a mass of poorly coded, unsupported websites and apps knocking around the place. Who knows? It’s early days.

It's widget time!

Here's how the market has developed over time. Click through the stages to watch it change. Wow.

The costs along the top are a guide to what people might normally pay for something bespoke, but bear in mind that's not what the WaaS/SaaS folks are charging (at least not in one lump sum).

And I know, I know. The choice of approach is going to come down to all sorts of things like complexity and so on. After all, some websites are business-critical applications that have to stay upright when 80k people try to get tickets all at once. Some websites are smaller project showcases. I've also left out in-house teams from this. And probably some other specific bits of nuance. Oops.

So what?

It’s just an observation, and I'm painting with a very broad brush, but here's what I see in this…

The middle is being squeezed, which is a pretty common thing to happen. There’s more competition at the lower end, and more again in the £20-100k range, where website-as-a-service and agencies now overlap. If you’re an arts organisation in the market for a website with that sort of budget, lucky you.

Established agencies have always tended to chase work upmarket, looking for clients with bigger budgets and more interesting problems in need of solutions. That move will probably become a little more urgent.

Although the bigger you go, the more likely an organisation is to bring chunks of website development and maintenance in-house. And what if agentic coding means that those teams become even more productive - outsourcing less than they would've? And what if more of the larger institutions see that there's value in bringing things in-house? In that case, the middle would be squeezed from above and below, with more competition in a slightly shrinking pool.

Anyway, that was all in my head, and now it's not. Thanks for reading.