Tom Henderson Smith
Tom Henderson Smith is a Cornwall-based artist who specializes in landscape and seascape paintings. He is a long-standing client of ours, being one of our first clients when we first moved to Cornwall in 2006.
The Problem
The site that we built for Tom in 2006 was a static HTML website which used PayPal buy now buttons for selling paintings and prints. The site had evolved over the years with some layout changes, but with the technologies behind it pretty much staying the same.
Tom is very active on his site and being able to keep the content updated himself is very important to him. With that in mind he had been using the Contribute software (originally Macromedia and then taken over by Adobe), which provided a user-friendly editing interface. However, over time Tom had been finding the software was beginning to have issues making it much less user-friendly, and with it being discontinued by Adobe there wasn’t the option to upgrade.
Tom was also keen to see the website brought up-to-date with current expectations, for example making it work better for tablets and smart phones.
The Solution
So, when Tom came to us asking for our advice, we recommended that we move the website on to it’s next phase. Our recommendation was to use WooCommerce as the basis of the site and with the combination of the WooCommerce shopping cart plugin and WooCommerce’s Storefront theme we could bring the site bang up-to-date, opening up the possibilities for its development moving into the future.
The Result
The resulting site has a very clean and modern design allowing Tom’s fantastic paintings to really stand out:
The site is fully mobile-responsive so it works well on whatever device you are using, and offers sales with PayPal for secure online payments. The new website has a built-in gallery search to help you find paintings, and improved navigation with categories and tags.
Tom has effortlessly taken on editing his site using the new system and is excited to see how it will continue to develop using the new features available to him.
Testimonial from Tom
“If like me you are interested in growing and evolving your website as a way of communicating, promoting products and developing sales online then I would really recommend Webfooted Designs as the people to help you. Ever since they initially set up my ‘Art of Tom Henderson Smith’ website eleven years ago they have supported and encouraged my efforts to effectively content-manage it. Over the past year this has involved a considerable upgrade with the move to WordPress. They had set up a WordPress blog for me from the start and now the website I have on this platform enables online viewers to have a much more sophisticated engagement with my art than was previously the case. The content development possibilities appear to be endless!”
