J. Alix Barber Photography

Showcase/Fine-art photography & boutique

The brief

J. Alix Barber is an award-winning photographer, writer, curator and creative director. Her work had grown well past a portfolio: a fine-art gallery, a boutique of handbags and gifts drawn from her photographs, a memoir, an art consulting practice for designers and hospitality groups, and a giving program, each with a name of its own.

All of it lived on a Wix site that had stopped doing it justice. She set out what she wanted in a detailed slide-by-slide brief, page by page, in her own words. The new site had to feel like a gallery, not a store, while still selling, and it could not lose any of the visitors and search traffic the old site had earned.

What SimplePath built

A home page that opens on one of her own photographs and introduces each part of the studio in turn, then a page for each: The Gallery, with collectible works shown in a masonry or row view; Framed by Spaces, which shows her artwork placed in designed rooms at real scale; The Profundities Boutique; the Surviving to Sovereignty memoir; and The Art of Giving.

The boutique is a working shop, filtered by type and by collection. Every handbag, scarf, mug and journal has its own product page with its photographs and story, sizes and finishes where a piece comes in more than one, and a basket that follows the visitor around the site. One inquiry form handles acquisitions, curation, licensing and commissions, so every conversation reaches her already sorted.

Leaving Wix without losing a thing

More than 150 artworks and products came across with their names, photographs, prices and options, and the site now runs on her own domain, jalixbarberphotography.com. Every old Wix address was matched to its new home, more than 200 of them, so a bookmark, a shared link or a Google result from the old site still lands on the right page instead of an error.

The gallery and the boutique both read from one catalogue, so adding a piece, changing a price or retiring a design updates every page it appears on, with nothing to rebuild.