Services delivered
- Custom site design
- Full admin dashboard
- SEO foundation
- Wikidata entity setup
- Image optimization
- Newsletter system
Brief
John had been working from a Squarespace site that no longer matched the way he was working. Adding a new piece took longer than painting one. The image quality was being compressed beyond use. There was no way to mark a work as sold without manually editing the title every time. The shop section he'd never really wanted in the first place sat awkwardly across every page.
He wanted three things, in this order: a site that did justice to the work, an admin he could actually use, and full ownership of everything we built — no more being trapped on a platform he was paying monthly to fight against.
Approach
We started from the work. Spent a morning at his studio looking at paintings, prints, and the way he talked about each one. The site that came out of that conversation was quiet — generous whitespace, museum-grade typography, no decoration competing with the work.
Everything was built from scratch on Next.js and Supabase, with images served via WebP and lazy-loaded so the gallery feels weightless even on slow connections. Each artwork has structured metadata: medium, dimensions, year, edition number, and an available / reserved / sold state that updates instantly across the site.
The admin was the part we spent most time on. Adding a new piece now takes under a minute — drag in a photo, fill in three fields, publish. A simple inquiry inbox routes interested collectors straight to his email. A newsletter system lets him send well-formatted updates without leaving the dashboard.
We set up a Wikidata entity for John as part of the SEO foundation, alongside structured data on every page so search engines understand who the work belongs to. Hosting, code, and database all live under his accounts — we're collaborators, not landlords.
Outcome
The site launched in early 2026. John updates it himself now, usually from his phone in the studio between coats of paint. The work shows up the way it deserves to — large, uncompressed, surrounded by space.
Concretely: inquiries are up, the manual workflow of marking things sold has been replaced with a single toggle, and he no longer pays a monthly fee to a platform that was actively making his work harder to see.
The bigger win is harder to measure. The site feels like the work. That was always the point.