David Ball

Video Post-Production | Website Development | Photography

Vasquez Rocks, California

Red Letter Clay

Website Design

Red Letter Clay is my personal ceramic line. After a 5 year studio practice and selling at various markets around Chicago, I wanted an online store to allow for national shipping of my work and in-person pick ups as an option for sales.

INVOLVEMENT

  • Website Development
  • Logo Design
  • Product Photography
  • E-Commerce

View Photography

TECHNOLOGY

  • Jekyll + GitHub Pages
  • Snipcart E-Commerce
  • Adobe Lightroom
  • Adobe Illustrator
  • Figma

ONLINE

E-Commerce Done Differently

— Database Free on the JAMstack

With the ever increasing prices of CMS platforms requiring annual commitments for the best prices, I opted to stay contract free by going with an offsite shopping cart system called Snipcart. What is my monthly hosting fee? $0!

Red Letter Clay Logo

Snipcart Integration

— Powerful secure shopping carts for $20/mo

Snipcart is a developer-first HTML/JavaScript shopping cart platform. It has a few advantages:

  • Builds authentic e-commerce on top of any CMS or static website - and seamlessly: giving developers full access to restyle their shopping cart embeds.
  • Avoids future migration costs and pain. Unlike mainstream platforms, they make it easy to export your assets and data.
  • E-commerce integration with external tools via RESTFUL API & Webhooks.

A Kubernetes script hosted for free on Digital Ocean checks Snipcart's API and places a sold overlay on items that have been purchased before the website is updated. While Snipcart provides this information in the shopping cart modal when items are added, this solution provided a superior user experience for shoppers by quickly showing them what was no longer available. The script also adds a CSS class to the Add to Cart button, to hide it on the page when the item is sold.

I found Snipcart great for shops that don't manage huge inventories - perfect for a handmade ceramic line that's typically updated in small batches.

Resources
Email template

Mobile Ready

— Social Media + Email Covered

Clean straightforward navigation and layouts for mobile devices make for pleasant shopping experiences on social media and via email. These can be easily incorporated into Instagram stories & various marketing campaigns.

Blog

Exploration Into Practice + Inspiration

— Content never hurts SEO

Using Jekyll's native blog post features, galleries and videos can be featured to understand the maker's interests and inspiration for his ceramic practice. Tagging the posts aids visitors seeking particular types of content.

Form Spree

— Spam-free contact forms: the dream

After having worked with WPForms who overcharges for WordPress form integration while doing a terrible job keeping spambots out of your inbox, I much prefer using formspree.io for my forms.

The free plan covers 50 contact submissions and month (and those do not count flagged spam submissions). Their spam detection is top notch, saving the headache of deleting spam submissions constantly.

Contact Form by formspree.io

Beyondmedia Education

GnarWare Workshop

A Chicago based digital media studio.
  • Website Design & Development
  • Photography
  • Video Editing
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  • Digital Marketing + Management
  • Content Management System Migration
Happily working with
  • Squarespace
  • Shopify
  • Github Pages (Jekyll)
  • CraftCMS
  • Webflow
  • Wordpress + WooCommerce
  • Wix

Websites don't have to be alien technology.

© 2024 David Ball. All rights reserved.
Jamstack
The new front-end stack: Javascript, APIS and Markup