Recommendations on building a foundry website

Igor Petrovic
Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
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-Todd
    James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 420
    I highly recommend Fontdue. I’ve only used the ecommerce portion but it has the tools to handle the rest of the website.
  • Matthijs Herzberg
    Matthijs Herzberg Posts: 154
    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 Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,896
    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 Penner
    Justin Penner Posts: 65
    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 Hudson
    John Hudson Posts: 3,227
    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.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
    Would the WordPress site used to showcase fonts be slow?

    I would use Gumroad as an external solution for purchases, but I still would like to have a live type sampler on it. Is loading all those custom fonts a problem?

    Also, I tend to use a lot of promo images (up to 20 per font) and some of them are quite large because of the style and size (4 Mb). Would the gallery be slow?

    Also, is there anything else that makes WP inconvenient for the foundry site?
  • Roel Nieskens
    Roel Nieskens Posts: 188
    WordPress or not, those are legitimate concerns, to which generic solutions can be applied. You can use subsetted fonts (load minimal font to show your "quick brown fox" text, swap in a fuller font upon editing) and you can optimise and lazy load images.

    (If an image is still 4MB after optimising, I'd reconsider using it!)
  • Muhittin Güneş
    Muhittin Güneş Posts: 7
    On Framer, a friend of mine created a new theme for type foundries. It went online yesterday, so I haven't had a chance to try it yet, but type tester and inspector looks very clean. 

    You can find the theme on here.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
    Thanks, Muhittin. It looks pretty clean and nice, especially the tester. I am glad someone provided such a solution and hope it will pay off for the developers/designers!

    If some of them are reading this, I would just have a point:

    —  Once I click on the BUY button (on the main product page) I am taken to the purchase page where I can choose to buy a full pack or individual styles. I had a problem identifying what's clickable there (it turns out it's the price). I would expect buttons here.

    On that matter, the main BUY button would probably better work if not black (as the rest of the UI) since it's CTA.

    Anyway, I wish them all the luck!
  • Matthew Smith
    Matthew Smith Posts: 90
    edited August 31
    Igor Petrovic said:
    —  Once I click on the BUY button (on the main product page) I am taken to the purchase page where I can choose to buy a full pack or individual styles. I had a problem identifying what's clickable there (it turns out it's the price). I would expect buttons here. 

    I get the impression that this theme doesn’t integrate an e-commerce solution, hence why that checkout experience is a little strange.

    Would love to be wrong though!

    EDIT: Based on this Twitter video, it seems to confirm that you need to individually link out each style to a purchase page elsewhere. (Regardless, agree that the whole button/row should be clickable.)

  • John Butler
    John Butler Posts: 297
    The way Fontdue handles embedding seems to avoid the biggest security hole with every other foundry website I’ve examined.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 307
    With all due respect to Fontdue, it is too expensive for a wide range of independent type designers who are trying to emancipate themselves from big stores like My Fonts and Creative Market.

    Having externalized e-commerce (which might be challenging when it comes to offering clear license packages) and front-end test rendering (as the only solution; it would be great to pick front or back-end since some foundries prefer front-end despite font files exposure) is not perfect.

    But I see this as an important first step and hope that developers will earn enough so they can develop it further. 
  • Typedesigner
    Typedesigner Posts: 50
    Thierry Blancpain said:
    Just to add to what everyone else said: you can even launch a foundry site with super minimal HTML and an email link. Stripe (or any competitor of theirs) allows you to send invoices manually, which will be absolutely no problem for you since you won’t get hundreds of requests right away. Once you do, you’ll have the funds for a more serious solution.

    Grilli Type started with a Wordpress site and manual Paypal links back in 2009. After we got a payment we manually sent out the fonts whenever we were back at the computer. That might not be acceptable anymore in 2023, but worked for us back then.

    Long story short: just launch. Figure out how to grow the features that are most needed over time.
    I really like your website. Can you please tell me which e-commerce technology you are currently using? Was your website programmed in HTML 5 yourself or by a design agency?
  • Thierry Blancpain
    Thierry Blancpain Posts: 210
    Typedesigner said:
    I really like your website. Can you please tell me which e-commerce technology you are currently using? Was your website programmed in HTML 5 yourself or by a design agency?
    The site is from 2016 and quite outdated but it does the job, for now. We’re using a custom-developed backend and frontend. Under the hood it uses a PHP backend (how outdated!) and an AngularJS frontend (also a little outdated), but again: it does the job.

    We designed it ourselves, I developed the frontend HTML/CSS and my friends at https://what.digital coded the backend and transformed my static frontend into one that’s fed by the backend information.

    But I really don’t think that a new foundry needs all of that. As I said above, a simple site showcasing the available typefaces is well enough to start with, you don’t even need ecommerce—although it’s certainly helpful.

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