This website evaluates and compares the CMS/hosting platforms WordPress and Sqaurespace for the use-case of selling art-related goods, such as prints, zines, or art objects.

Charlie Chayyim Shaw
Information Technologies
Spring 2023
Prof. Rachel Daniell

many prebuilt CMS templates have limitations to their design and customization which become very apparent when trying to make a website’s style and layout optimally enhance design-based content (such as zines, exhibition materials, etc.) which have a distinct visual style. this becomes even more apparent when creating product-oriented pages.

Molly Soda's website (hosted on hotglue)
[Source: screenshot of mollysoda.exposed]

Molly Soda's storefront (hosted on Big Cartel)
[Source: screenshot of mollysoda.bigcartel.com]

Hubris & Sons online storefront (hosted on Instagram)
[Source: screenshot of instagram.com/hubrisandsons]

Hubris & Sons item listing for The World of Clowns (hosted on Instagram)
[Source: screenshot of instagram.com/p/B1R862UHGN6]

as an alternative artists may use two different CMS—one for their standard webpage 'portfolio' and another for a shopfront.

one example of this is Molly Soda, who uses hotglue.me to host her main site and Big Cartel to host her online shop; this allows her to take advantage of the stylistic potential of hotglue to emulate early 2000's-style webpages, as well as the commerce features built into Big Cartel

another alternative is selling primarily offline, through shopfronts, art/zine fairs, etc., which is supplemented with synchronous selling on social media, such as Instagram posts/stories.

one example of this is Hubris & Sons (formerly Issues) in Oakland, a rare/unique books and zines shop, who began to co-post on their Instagram after having to move storefronts and limit their hours to one day a week.