I didn't start off as a web developer. I grew up drawing and painting, and eventually completed a Fine Arts degree in college. But the idea of trying to make a living as an artist, and provide for a family, was intimidating to say the least. I just didn't see how I would be able to make it work. So along the way I explored computers, first graphic design, then web design, then eventually web development. I came up during the 90's when technical roles weren't so structured and everyone was figuring things out. I took a half-credit class on HTML in college, which was taught by another student because there weren't any professors who could even teach it yet. I quickly found work as a "webmaster". If you knew HTML and image editing software, it was pretty easy to find work back then.
And honestly, I enjoyed it. I was good at it. There was a lot of learning on the job. I learned Microsoft's ASP, and a little Javascript. In 2000 I was hired to teach web-programming at the Art Institute of Portland. I had never taken a programming class in my life, but I ended up teaching several of them. I taught for 15 years. These students were artists, designers, and web geeks. I understood them. They were my people! Together we explored Adobe's flash actionscript, Javascript, PHP, early versions of Wordpress, databases, HTML and CSS... oh, so much CSS.
Fast-forward a few years and I discovered Drupal. It was a game-changer for me. This was around Drupal 4. I had built a lot of custom PHP e-commerce websites at the agencies I worked with, and we spent a lot of time creating our own content management tools. But Drupal was clearly better. It wasn't long before I left the agencies and started my own business -- focused on building websites with Drupal. I've been running my own small Drupal agency since 2007. When I say small, I do mean small. We've had as many as 4 employees, but currently there are just 2 of us.
We build and maintain a few projects for Oregon State University, and the University of Oregon. Other clients include the U.S. Lighthouse Society, The Xerces Society, and the National Society of Tax Professionals.
I also still paint, and I've been somewhat active in various local arts organizations. I have a number of artist friends and connections. Often over the years I would hear them say "Oh I really need a website", and I've occasionally build custom websites for a few artist friends. The challenge of course is that artists rarely have much money, and building a custom website is expensive.
I wondered if we could build a turn-key solution for artists using Drupal. Most artists have pretty similar needs in a website. You need a solid image gallery, you need a way to create categories for your various artwork in the gallery. Some artists are ready to sell their art online, so you need an online e-commerce store, but it should be optional because many artists aren't ready for that yet. And you just need other basic tools like a contact form page, and control over the theme colors and fonts. But it would basically be the same functionality across multiple sites. Ideally we could provide a selection of pre-built themes the artist could choose from that wouldn't need much configuration.
I wanted this to be very simple to use, and simple to launch. If a bunch of artists sign up, I don't want to spend a ton of time launching and configuring their various websites.. I just wanted it to be a turn-key launch at no cost to the artist, and they would just pay a small hosting fee. My goal isn't necessarily to get rich (although I'm not totally against that).. but really I am trying to create something that will be helpful and useful for artists -- that would require minimal upkeep and maintenance on my end.
Drupal's multi-site environment along with the ability to create installation profiles, installing and pre-configuring modules, views, and themes, really gives me a great tool-set to accomplish this. We love YAML files! We spent about 6-7 months working on what we call "ArtSites" (https://artsite.studio). If an artist signs up, and they are okay with creating a subdomain "[myname].artsite.studio", the launch is instantaneous. We configured the process so that completing the sign-up payment form then redirects you directly to the new website installation process.
The mySQL database is created automatically behind the scenes, and we use some custom PHP to write the settings file, connecting up the database and making other configurations. As part of the installation process, we ask them to list out what categories they would like to set up, and then we establish these as menu items and taxonomy terms. There's also a blog set up if they want to use that. Right now we have a couple themes ready to go, and we pre-fill the themes with default images they can easily swap out. I've created a number of how-to videos that are in the FAQ section to show people how to manage the website, change their theme colors, post artwork, etc..
We went ahead and committed to Drupal Commerce, as that seemed the right approach. So when an artist wants to post up artwork, they are actually adding a product in their store. Many artists might not want a store at first, but I think enough will that this makes sense. Adding a store to the website if you already have a bunch of art up there would be a pain, so we just lock in the store / product framework from the beginning.
You can choose not to ever sell anything, and it still all works fine just as an art gallery, but if you do ever decide to start selling your work, you already have products. Just add prices (by adding product variations) and connect it up to payment processing and you're good to go. Using YAML config files we pre-configured some product attributes that would be typical for most visual artists like size, frame option, and type of art (original or print).
Overall it's working great, but we only recently launched. Our price-point is low, just $200/year, which works out to about $16/month. So that's pretty great for artists given the other options for full-blown eCommerce sites out there. We don't take any commission on sales, and there's no set-up fee, unless you need some custom work completed.
We learned a lot working on this project, and hopefully we can convince a few artists out there to give it a try. It's been a good change of pace for us to build something that we will own and not to have to hand off to a client!