Recommendations on building a foundry website

Comments

• James Hultquist-Todd Posts: 380

  April 2023

  I highly recommend Fontdue. I’ve only used the ecommerce portion but it has the tools to handle the rest of the website.

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• Craig Eliason Posts: 1,398

  April 2023

  My website uses Fontdue as well, incorporated into a site I built with Webflow. The relative ease of both of those tools meant I could figure out how to design and construct it myself, which I enjoyed. Of course both tools mean ongoing charges, but it will take many, many months for those to add up to what a custom from-scratch solution would have cost me up front, I figure.

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• Matthijs Herzberg Posts: 143

  April 2023

  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.
  

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• Thomas Phinney Posts: 2,748

  April 2023

  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.
  

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• Justin Penner Posts: 63

  April 2023

  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
  

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• John Hudson Posts: 2,974

  April 2023

  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.
  

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• Matthew Smith Posts: 84

  April 2023 edited April 2023

  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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• Thierry Blancpain Posts: 201

  April 2023

  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.

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• Igor Petrovic Posts: 263

  January 11

  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?
  

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• Roel Nieskens Posts: 187

  January 12

  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!)

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