I have been thinking a lot about my website, how to structure it, and how to structure my shop. I don’t have time to add all of my artwork to the site, nor would you probably want to look through it all. But I am slowly starting to add some. I also don’t really want to just have pages and pages of artwork to scroll through.

What I have decided to do is to have a featured piece of artwork, that will be the one that I load onto my website in that timeframe. I can’t decide if one a month or one every two weeks would be better. I’m leaning toward the every two weeks, as I continually paint, and have a ton of art already done and digitized.

What I would like to do is one current piece, and then one older piece. So once a month there would be a new piece and an old piece featured, but not necessarily at the same time.

Then I will be adding that specific piece of art to my shop and there will be a discount while it is running as the featured piece, for all the products I decide to put the artwork on. How much of a discount I need to decide.

That is the other thing I will do differently. Instead of loading up a bunch of different products and making a bunch of different pages with all the various products, I want to stream line the process by using the 1 piece of art and adding all the products I produce in that piece to the same listing so you can see them all at once. You can see that with the 3 most recent pieces I’ve added.

Not every piece of art will be on every product as some pieces work well on mugs, others on towels, and so forth. Most of that depends on the orientation of the piece, horizontal pieces work better on mugs, while vertical pieces work well on water bottles. Most pieces will work on towels and bags. And of course, all the art will be available as prints and note card sets.

I love making ornaments as well, and haven’t figured out how to share a large variety at Christmastime without it being pages and pages. But fortunately, I now have 10 or so months to figure that one out.

I am not quite ready to offer the discounts, I still need to figure that out on the website, whether it’s a coupon code or a blanket sale. I would really like to offer my subscribers even a little more discount just as a thank you for subscribing, but I don’t know how to set that up yet either.

When I get it all figured out, my goal is February 1st, I will start adding the featured artwork at the bottom of each one of my blog posts as well as on the homepage so it’s visible to anyone. But, I think I can also send something just to my subscribers with that extra discount. We’ll see what happens!

Lastly, I want to rotate my art, so I will have only a certain number of pieces available on my website at a time, I was thinking between 15 and 20 when I get it all loaded. Then I will just pull a piece off every time I load a new piece on. This should keep the shop clean, fresh, and easy to navigate.

I am not usually a talk to think person, but sometimes it helps for me to see it all laid out on paper (or computer screen). This has been very clarifying for me, and I hope you didn’t find my thinking too boring as I went along. Thanks for being here with me on my journey! The artwork for this post is just a couple of quick sketch.