Rippingham Art Website – online marketplace

Overview of the project

Jan Rippingham is an established artist who wanted to sell her work and that of fellow artists online. During the first phase of development, we knew that to get ahead of the competition, Rippingham Art had to be different, and because costs were tight, we had to be clever with our strategy. Competitor research showed us a lack of an unrushed, take-your-time feel; a ‘sit back and explore’ approach to navigation. We believed that an online art gallery should have a timeless, wandering-around atmosphere where viewers can browse with a cup of coffee and buy in their own time.

We created a user-friendly online art gallery, using large imagery to ensure artwork was at the heart of the site, sizing it for all screens and devices. To ensure the quality of the content, which for the most part was user-generated as artists uploaded their work for sale, we designed a moderator function so that Jan could control the content. Rippingham Art now sells art on behalf of 1,100 artists and there are over 1,800 works of art available to buy.

Five years after launch, we progressed to phase two development with an upgrade from the old WooCommerce set-up – from version 1 to 3 – which also included moving old plugins and features to the new set up and migrating over 50,000 pieces of art! We also gave the site a modern face-lift to make it super mobile-friendly and enabled predictive search.