LEAWOOD FINE ART

leawoodfineart.com

Leawood Fine Art is a gallery and frame shop located in Leawood, Kansas. They represent several local and national artists and provide framing and art hanging services for the Kansas City area. They reached out to get help with one of their computers, and mentioned the website almost in passing. They already knew what wasn't working about it — they just hadn't found anyone to fix it.

Leawood Fine Art was happy with the general design of their website. They just wanted it to be easier to navigate and edit, with a focus on the artist gallery pages. Two Bit worked with them to identify pain points and to define their ideal workflows. Adding new artists and editing existing ones was cumbersome and the artists' work lacked information about the individual pieces.

The first decision was what not to do. They liked their site, so we left the design alone and put the work into the parts that were failing them — the editing process, and the artist galleries built on top of it.

Each artist now has room for available work, sold work, and photographs of pieces hanging in people's homes. The sold work earns its place: it shows a buyer that the gallery sells, which a wall of available pieces never quite does on its own. The in-situ shots answer the question every buyer is already asking, which is what it would look like at home. Individual pieces carry title, medium, size and price, so nobody has to send an email to find out.

We took what they had and streamlined it, reducing some of the animation and tightening up performance and security. The fonts alone went from 818KB to 74KB once we self-hosted them as a single variable file — the sort of change nobody notices, except that the gallery now loads quickly on a phone in the parking lot.

The existing site ran on WordPress and we kept it there. They already knew the platform and it does what they need — moving them somewhere new would have been change for its own sake.

The split is straightforward now. They handle the artist galleries, which is the part they wanted back. We look after the hosting, the maintenance and the search engine work behind it, and they call when something bigger comes up.

They have already started adding artwork to the artist pages themselves. That's the real test. The old setup turned a small update into a project, and a working gallery doesn't have time for a project every time a new piece comes in. Now the site keeps pace with the gallery.