Recommendations on building a foundry website

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  • harborb
    harborb Posts: 10
    Hey I am about to try to build my site using Webflow and fondue. anyone here done it before and would be willing to hop on a call and give me any advice before I jump in?
  • James Puckett
    James Puckett Posts: 2,017
    I’m in the process of building mine with Webflow and Fontdue. Some of it is easy, but Webflow recently updated their UI so it doesn’t always resemble the training videos. I’m having to throw a few simple pages together so I can figure out how to get all the CSS classes working. That said, it’s much easier than trying to customize a half-baked Wordpress theme and never being able to get everything working exactly right.
  • Alanna Munro
    Alanna Munro Posts: 9
    I built my site with Fontdue and Webflow last fall. I had a bit of experience with HTML and CSS going into it and so the way Webflow structures things made a lot of sense. There are also a lot of tutorials and forum questions that I relied on when I got stuck.

    Fondue integrates nicely, just dropping in little code blocks here and there to put in type testers, cart buttons, etc. The Fondue documentation is pretty clear as well and I found Tom to be very responsive if I got stuck or had a feature request.  

    harborb said:
    Hey I am about to try to build my site using Webflow and fondue. anyone here done it before and would be willing to hop on a call and give me any advice before I jump in?
    Happy to chat more with anyone thinking of putting together this combo.
  • Matthijs Herzberg
    Matthijs Herzberg Posts: 155
    I too am building a new website with Webflow and Fontdue. Don't have much to say about it yet except that I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed, but going at it one step at a time just like how I learned type design. Will report my experience when it is done.
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 322
    Since recently, Gumroad has become open source:
    https://gumroad.gumroad.com/p/gumroad-is-now-open-source

    Does this mean that one can take their code for e-commerce solutions and reuse it to code a foundry site?
  • Thomas Phinney
    Thomas Phinney Posts: 3,006
    Yes.
  • Kelly Hobkirk
    Kelly Hobkirk Posts: 2
    Any suggestions for a complete non-programmer building a foundry website? I will never be a programmer, but as a new foundry, I am seeking something economical and editable so that I can regularly add new releases. I am sure to eventually be on Fontdue, but would like to be profitable prior to this. Is this wishful thinking?
  • Igor Petrovic
    Igor Petrovic Posts: 322
    If you have no code knowledge and much money to invest, you would probably want to go via WordPress or paid web builders (Wix, Squarespace, Framer or so).

    The three main questions here are:

    1) E-commerce solution so you can sell your fonts.

    I have a WP site, but haven't messed with Shopify or whatever. Instead, I am using Gumroad as an external solution. However, since I don't have a lot of sales, I am considering turning off the automatic purchase solution and selling licenses only on direct request. This is mainly so I can control to whom and for which purpose I sell, so I don't have to catch infringement in the wild. Not sure what e-commerce options are available on web builders.

    2) Type tester

    In general, there a very limited (if any) plugins for this. There was one WP plugin. I think there are no easy options for webuilders. Probably a custom-coded component.

    3) License options in e-commerce solutions

    Font licensing is a specific matter, so not all e-commerce solutions fit this purpose. I made product variants on Gumroad. But I sell there only Desktop and Basic Web licenses, so the UI is not very cluttered. If I wanted to sell all the license types and options, it would not work. 
  • Kelly Hobkirk
    Kelly Hobkirk Posts: 2
    edited June 7
    Thank you for sharing your experience with Gumroad and CMS tools. (I am quite familiar with WordPress, but have many times experienced the "half-baked Wordpress themes" James Puckett mentioned above. In years past, I used to design every (client) site from scratch then have them custom coded in WP. Lately, it's been more about utilizing stock themes, many of which fail at some point during the build or lack critical documentation.)

    I would go entirely with Fontdue, but I have an odd issue in having attempted to change my foundry name, and now having two foundries. One distributor discouraged the name change, saying I'd have to keep the existing one as well. The first foundry's site is on WordPress and EDD, but the theme is quite old and incompatible with modern EDD. Thus, I had to remove the buy options and shift to links to distributor sites.

    In short, it seems I need two sites for now, so I am seeking at least one economical solution.

    I will follow your suggestions here to see what I cobble together. Thank you.
  • Drawcard
    Drawcard Posts: 74
    edited June 16
    Igor Petrovic said:


    2) Type tester

    In general, there a very limited (if any) plugins for this. There was one WP plugin. I think there are no easy options for webuilders. Probably a custom-coded component.
    The type tester you're probably thinking of is: https://github.com/kontur/fontsampler-wordpress-plugin however it's not currently maintained by the author.

    Having said that the plugin is basically a wrapper for the JS library which, with a bit of know how, is also easy enough to implement within a HTML block on your webpage.

  • mitradranirban
    mitradranirban Posts: 71


    Drawcard said:
    Having said that the plugin is basically a wrapper for the JS library which, with a bit of know how, is also easy enough to implement within a HTML block on your webpage.

    Though I have no knowledge in PHP programming I am able to vibe code a WordPress plug-in using the fontsampler.js libray that somewhat works.
     
    Though this is sufficient for hobbyists like me, if you are starting a professional foundry your should get this done by some experienced WordPress developer, as LLM generated codes are known to contain bugs and security issues. 

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