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Recommendations on building a foundry website

Igor PetrovicIgor Petrovic Posts: 213
in Type Business
What approach would you recommend for a simple foundry site: coding in HTML/CSS from scratch, CMS like WordPress, website builders, or something else?

A simple foundry site showcasing fonts with the usual type sampler and a few classic pages & functions (blog, about us, FAQ, licensing, newsletter subscription .etc)

Option A: Using external payment processing like Gumroad
Option B: Selling fonts directly from the site 
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Comments

  • James Hultquist-ToddJames Hultquist-Todd Posts: 347
    I highly recommend Fontdue. I’ve only used the ecommerce portion but it has the tools to handle the rest of the website.
  • Matthijs HerzbergMatthijs Herzberg Posts: 133
    I have a squarespace website with Shopify Buy Button for e-commerce. I also hired a guy to write a Javascript/CSS type tester.
    Not as pretty as Fontdue and lacking some options for sure, but only ~$250/year + stripe/paypal fee. Works decently. Will probably upgrade to Fontdue or lttrshop or something similar at some point, when my library contents justify the fees.
  • Thomas PhinneyThomas Phinney Posts: 2,511
    The current FontLab site is also built in Webflow. I was very impressed with Webflow, although I never got half as good at it as Adam and Yuri. Fontdue integrates with Webflow, so if I were doing a foundry site I would definitely look at that combination.

    For TheFontDetective.com (non font sales) site I went with an Elementor-based theme  on top of WordPress. If I had it to do over again, I would avoid Elementor, which is an easy-to-use design-focused thing that lives on top of WordPress; most of the cool design stuff it did was substantially added into later versions of WordPress, and it made some things more difficult to customize and maintain. The site does look slick, though, and I did most of it myself.
  • Justin PennerJustin Penner Posts: 42
    I designed and coded my site (justinpenner.ca) including the type tester, but my e-commerce is just links to Gumroad pages. A few foundries like Delve, Nuform and Cinetype also use Gumroad.

    Fontdue seems like the most popular option these days, but LttrShop and FoundryCore look great, too.

    See also: https://typedesignresources.com/#e-commerce-platforms
  • John HudsonJohn Hudson Posts: 2,723
    As a first step, I recommend mapping out what you want to do with the site, what you might want to do with it in future, and figure out what features are essential, nice to have, or not important to you. In terms of future development, also consider whether you want somethng you can build on or something you plan to replace.
  • Matthew SmithMatthew Smith Posts: 72
    edited April 17
    To keep costs low in the beginning and for full flexibility, I built Tipofili as a static site using Jekyll (free), hosted on GitHub (free-ish), and paired it with Fontdue ($640/yr).

    Fontdue can be paired with pretty much anything that allows you to inject some JS. You could probably add it to Squarespace, Cargo, etc.

    To more directly answer your question: I would say to start with what ever you are most comfortable with. The lower the barrier of entry, the easier it’ll be to get things off the ground.
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