As an artist, having an ecommerce store is a great way to establish an online presence and strengthen your brand. For client Nico, it was all of these reasons and more, as she was revamping her Anico Art brand in preparation for the annual Otafest 2023 convention, and at the same time wanted to update her old website to modern web standards. 

This was a large and gratifying project despite the time crunch to launch the site before the 2023 Otafest convention. The process involved multiple different steps including WordPress designing and development, graphic design with Photoshop and ensuring the site held up to modern standards of responsive design and usability. It was a pleasure to work with Nico and utilize her beautiful branding elements to create a fun and boldly unique site. 

My priorities for this large-scale project were to craft a site that was unique and which showcased Nico’s quirky artistic personality as well as her new branding. At the beginning of the project, I decided to start from scratch rather than update the existing site as it was quite outdated, and since the objective is to have an online store, it’s important to stay secure and meet the latest safety standards. After gathering together a handful of possible WordPress themes, Nico chose one from Avada. 

The next step was to gather the site’s content, which mainly involved photographing product images.  Despite the tight deadline, we agreed that transparent product images would offer a cleaner and more modern look to the site, so Photoshopping the images was a top priority. Establishing foundational branding aspects like the colours and fonts as well as linking social media accounts were also top-of-mind.

After creating product pages, the rest of the tasks included troubleshooting the site’s functionality, responsiveness, SEO terms and payment options.