The August Website Grant goes to Suzanne Dolan, a contemporary artist in County Galway who builds narrative vessels by hand from coiled earthenware. Her site is built and her corrections are in. It went live at suzannedolanart.com on 19 September 2026. The screenshots below are from the preview build she reviewed on 15 September 2026.
Who is Suzanne Dolan?
Suzanne trained in ceramics at Limerick School of Art and Design and spent 2012 in London as studio assistant to Barnaby Barford (from the CV she supplied for the site). Her vessels carry drawn and printed scenes that wrap the whole way round the pot. Balloons, shopfronts, a man in a suit, a laptop, a bear. In her own words, on the new site's About page, the scenes "appear playful at first but reveal more complicated stories on closer inspection", and "the fact that the story unfolds as you move around the pot is a big part of the work."
This year the work has been selected for the 196th Royal Hibernian Academy Annual Exhibition and the 145th Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition, and one vessel, Everything's Fine, made her a sculpture finalist in the Women in Art Prize (her CV, as she supplied it for the site's Exhibitions page). She had a solo show, Matrescence, at the Courthouse Gallery in Ennistymon in 2025.
What she did not have was a website. The domain suzannedolanart.com was registered and showed a "private site" placeholder; the work lived on Instagram, and sales went through Etsy.
Why her
The Grant page says applications are read on merit, impact and fit. Suzanne's had all three: a public record this year, a registered domain with nothing behind it, and a scope we could finish properly within the Grant.
What we built
Suzanne applied on 28 August. We sent the decision on 2 September and she accepted the same morning. Kick-off happened over two emails. The scope note went out on 3 September and she signed it off on 5 September.
Five main pages: Home, Work, About, Exhibitions and Press, Contact. Behind them, three things a working artist needs:
- A panel to add work herself. A photograph, a title, the year, the material and the size. She logs in with a code sent to her email, so there is no password to lose. Twelve vessels are on the site now, from 2024 to 2026, each on its own page.
- Hosting in her own name. The site runs on Cloudflare's free plan, on an account she holds. There is no fee to webs.ie; the only running cost she carries is the domain renewal she was already paying. The terms are the same for every recipient and are published at webs.ie/legal/grant-terms.
- A proper address. [email protected] forwards to her existing inbox, free, through the same account.
There is no shop, on purpose. Etsy already handles her sales, and a second checkout would be one more thing to keep in sync.
The design decision
The brief we set ourselves was a curatorial dossier on off-white paper. The photographs bring all the colour; the type, the hairlines and the whitespace do the separating. No cards with borders and drop shadows, no rounded photographs, one accent colour and it is only used for links. The page is quiet, and the vessels are loud.
The Exhibitions page doubles as her CV. Press the browser's print command on it and it prints as a clean document, with the site's address and the date at the top, which gives her a printable CV from the same content.
What she changed
We sent her the demo on 11 September. Her reply came the same afternoon: the structure and the pacing were right, and she had four visual changes.
- A cooler, cleaner white for the page ground.
- No italic serif. The headings had been in an italic serif face; she preferred plain sans-serif headings, so they are now a tight sans-serif throughout.
- Photographs with their backgrounds, not cut-outs. We had isolated the vessels against the paper; she preferred them as they were shot.
- Her name first. The home page used to open on a vessel. It now opens on her.
All four were in by the morning of 15 September, along with two things we caught on the way through: the six newest works on the home page instead of a fixed set, and the About page rebuilt in one column. That round is the reason the Grant does a demo before it does a launch.
What happens next
The site is live at suzannedolanart.com. From now on Suzanne adds new work herself, through the panel. Her work is also on Instagram at @suzannedolanart.
How the Grant works
Every month webs.ie offers one website, designed, built and launched free of charge, to a small business, an independent practice, a creative project or a nonprofit. The build is worth €2,500 or more at our normal rates (the figure on the Grant page); the recipient pays nothing to webs.ie, and there is no subscription afterwards.
June's Grant went to Dublin journalist Peter Dooley, whose site is live at peterdooley.ie. July's edition closed without a build. August's is Suzanne's.
The process is the same each month:
- Apply. A short form, about five minutes. No attachments.
- Review. A person at webs.ie reads every application.
- Selection. One recipient is contacted after the monthly deadline to confirm the scope and arrange kick-off.
- Build and launch. The agreed site is designed, built and launched, normally within about a week of kick-off. Suzanne reviewed her demo on 11 September; her changes were in by 15 September.
Everyone who applies hears back.
The September edition is open
Applications for this month's Website Grant close on 30 September 2026 at 23:59 Dublin time (the deadline on the Grant page). If you run a small business, a practice or a project that needs a focused, professional website, and you do not have one, apply here.
