Rebuilding a Website

In the midst of the beast - thinking about what I've tried and learned along the way with this short review of web builders.

I hadn’t planned on spending my week rebuilding my website. But that is where I’ve found myself. So, if you had been looking forward to my notes on AI-generated art (as I promised in last week’s note) - I’m going to wait and give that more thought next week when my head isn’t being tortured with diagrams of web links and I’ve had a chance to attend an in-person artist meet-up at my local Art Center (TheArtsCenter.net) where AI art is scheduled as a topic of discussion.

Instead, I’ll focus this week on the task at hand: Re-Building a Website.

If you’re a regular follower, you might remember me going down this path a mere (was it 8?) months ago, as I was reorganizing my artist website (JenniferLommers.com) to reflect the new directions of my art practice (i.e. adding informational pages on mixed media, collage, poetry, etc.).

What I didn’t mention at that time was I also became aware of needing to upgrade to a new version of the web builder I’m using (SquareSpace.com) in order to access the newest tools (and I do like playing with new tools)! In this instance, that means completely rebuilding my site (moving everything, page by page, from version 7.0 to 7.1) and then requesting to move my existing domain over to the new site.

So what prompted this effort to begin now? Simply put - tax season!

Yes, it’s that time of year when I’m pouring over expense sheets to prepare my taxes and I decided I have too much being added into the bucket for my online sales presence (which I have on a different platform - Squareup.com). So, what changed? Why did I think it made sense then, but not now?

A quick history of my gallery & selling platforms and web builders

I started selling paintings on eBay in 2003. In 2006 I bought my domain name JenniferLommers.com and built a simple informational website for my art business using my Mac account and HTML. I’ve sold my paintings on platforms such as Etsy, Blogspot (aka Blogger, using Paypal buttons), DailyPaintWorks, Artsala, Squarespace, Shopify, Etsy (again), and currently, Squareup. (And I’m probably forgetting a few others!) During most of that time, I maintained my business site using Squarespace (and still do). And while I briefly did manage my inventory there too, I later moved it to Etsy (for the shipping tools they provided at that time with a custom domain), and then to Squareup (after they improved their online store tools by acquiring Weebly, making it easier to manage inventory for in-person shows at the same time as online sales). As Squareup improved its tools, however, the expense went up. And what made sense when I relied on my own printshop for sales and shipped reproductions direct from my studio, no longer made sense as my direct sales slowed down with the evolving nature of my art business.

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Pros & Cons

For the variety of site builders I’ve used - here’s a summary of my experiences based on what they had available at the time I used them (shown here in reverse order of when I last used their tools). I would say all of them are worth exploring if you’re looking to build a website for your artist site or online storefront.

Squarespace - a great all-purpose web builder

I have been with this service for the longest, using it as my main informational artist website (with and without the selling tools). Since the start, I’ve liked the modern and professional templates they provide with various customization tools. I also find the tools to be mostly intuitive (and visual, which is great for artists) with strong help features when needed. Their latest version (7.1) seems to only improve on what I liked while adding a few key store-building features I wanted (such as nested store categories). It also has plenty of room to grow an art profile/business: offering a means to provide memberships, digital downloads, services, and easy 3rd party printing integration (such as Printful.com). Like most store-builders, though, I wish I had greater flexibility for handling shipping charges (I would prefer the ability to modify shipping options by item or category). But, there are ways to make it work for what I need. I also wish I could offer product add-ons (such as framing for an additional fee) and product choices with different prices (such as a print that is available in different sizes and therefore needs to be priced differently for each size). From what I can tell, these types of choices require separate inventory listings.¹ This is where Squareup (and most likely Shopify - although I haven’t tried their tools in a few years) excelled, even if it isn’t as intuitive or flexible.

Squareup (using Weebly) - a good all-purpose web builder

My studio store is currently on Squareup (which uses Weebly as its web builder) while I continue to work on setting up my inventory on Squarespace. When I needed to move my business completely online (as in-person shows were being canceled), I had to quickly decide where to go. I wanted something that could easily maintain my inventory, provide robust shipping options, and be customizable enough to match the theme of my portfolio site on Squarespace. Squareup met this challenge by immediately seeing a need in its current point-of-sale community and improving its offerings at a time when many of its customers (who used Square readers at in-person events) had to find a way to move that inventory online. In stepped Weebly as its store builder. While I did not find the tools as easy to understand as I did with other options, they do have a full range of capabilities in them. Each item can be assigned different styles (with different pricing and weights), and options (with pricing) can also be added. Setting up shipping was cumbersome, but workable. Once there are hundreds of items, however, it becomes tedious to make changes and almost impossible to find items that may be missing data needed to calculate the shipping (even after exporting all the data). Real-time item editing was also slow and would often glitch out and not save my changes (although this may have been fixed, since it hasn’t happened to me lately). In short, it has all the tools I need, but it was obviously built quickly causing it to lose its overall structure to a web of add-on functionality. All in all, I would still recommend it - especially if someone is already using their point-of-sale system.

Etsy - a good selling platform with built-in marketing options

After starting with eBay in 2003, I moved to Etsy in 2007 and spent many years selling my art on that platform. When they offered an option to create your own domain for selling your Etsy items, it seemed like a good fit for me at the time, and I moved my storefront there for a couple of years. Etsy has a lot of experience with item set-up and shipping options as well as taking the burden of sales tax calculations and collection out of the hands of the seller. In fact, if you don’t mind paying fees for every item sold or for extra advertising, it can still be a great place to sell.

Shopify - a fully functional store web builder

I briefly played with using Shopify a few years ago and found it to be too selling-only focused to meet my needs at that time. It also was probably more robust (and hence, more confusing) than I was ready to handle. It is widely used, however, and I’m sure has most, if not all, the functionality and custom features that a seller could want. I think it’s probably less successful as a portfolio site (which I also want to have for sharing my art and process with my customers), but I could be wrong. If I were to start a new business with an online store today, I would probably start here.

Artsala - a great option for gallery/consignment artists

I also briefly used the Artsala platform several years ago and found it very useful for artists who may not wish to sell online but would like a robust system for tracking their inventory while offering a place for customers to find their work. It was started by a very experienced and knowledgeable gallery owner, and it definitely has all the features that fit artists selling solely within that environment. I do not know its current status or features, but it might be worth your consideration if galleries and consignment stores are your primary venues for selling.

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My new online storefront (coming soon)

So, back to what prompted my sudden desire to upgrade my Squarespace account and add my storefront back to my main artist site: Bookkeeping for tax season (and looking at annual expenses).

I decided that the $79/month I was paying for a Squareup store (using their Weebly site-builder with full shipping options) in addition to the $33/month for my Squarespace account (for my JenniferLommers.com site version 7.0) - was a bit unnecessary. And, after revisiting the selling tools provided in the latest 7.1 version of Squarespace, I realized I should move my inventory back to a single site and close the Squareup store, saving me $47/month (or $564/year). (For the specific tools I want to use on Squarespace, fees will increase to $65 vs. $33/month). Depending on your business, this may or may not seem like an extravagant expense. At this point, for me, it looks like a lovely extra weekend away I could be taking each year (or several skeins of beautiful hand-spun fiber!)

In the last year, my direct online sales have dipped since I’m no longer offering the kind of products or as many products as I once did in my online studio store. At the start of the pandemic, I needed a storefront that could handle a larger sales base of my original work (without the in-person shows to sell them). I also wanted to leave Etsy behind since I felt the fees were no longer justifying the sales (and I was no longer selling prints directly after closing my in-house print shop to turn my focus more on art-making).

Basically, my sales strategies have continued to change as I grow and change with my art and with my chosen venues. When looking at the numbers, I realized that those changes meant my online strategies should change too, and I couldn’t justify spending extra for a robust online artist website (Squarespace & JenniferLommers.com) that was separate from my online selling platform (Squareup). I decided to look around at my options. And with my prior experience on Squarespace paired with an upgrade to their 7.1 tools, moving everything to be together on their site seemed like the best choice - even if it DOES mean rebuilding each page from 7.0 and making a new page in 7.1 - which, honestly, lends itself to an excellent opportunity to tidy up my site and consolidate the many pages of design that had been created over several years.

It is taking a lot of time. A. Lot. Thankfully, it is work I enjoy and it fits in with the general philosophy I first embraced after a computer crash in 2007 wiped out all my image files from the first few years of my art career.

Accepting unexpected loss and embracing a willingness to start over enables reconciliation with the past while providing an opportunity to reimagine a more beautiful and thoughtful outcome.

If you are in the market for building or refreshing an existing website or online store - I hope you find these experiences helpful, but you might also consider reviewing this list from Forbes.com which is specific to the needs of artists and includes ratings and links for some of the web builders I mentioned above (Squarespace, Shopify, and Weebly), as well as additional options: GoDaddy, WIX, Hostgator, Wordpress, Format, Zyro, SmugMug, GoDaddy and Webs.

Now, back to designing pages of art and loading up inventory!

Cheers,

Jennifer

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If you want to see my website in its finished form, my newsletter subscribers will be the first to receive the official announcement when it’s done.

1. edited 3/6/23 after discovering the tools (right in front of me!) for editing variations of a product. PRO for Squarespace. This discovery was assisted by their customer support chat feature, which I now fully recommend. They quickly answered questions while passing along the issue of easily setting up First Class shipping options to their development team. A+