Free flash gallery and shopping cart
These two free little apps pack a lot of punch for anyone, but for any starving artist the word “free” makes us drool. Coming across these apps on the interweb is like going to the grocery store when they are giving out free samples. A glorious day indeed. Enough small talk.
dfGallery is a great little flash gallery. In a previous post (Getting Online - Free and Simple) I looked at various ways an artist could get started with the internet. I concluded that going with a Wordpress blog and Picasa gallery was one of the easiest. That option is now even cooler as dfGallery can import your Picasa images. A new page could be made in Wordpress with dfGallery embedded in it. Everytime the Picasa gallery is updated the dfGallery on your website would also update. Sweet indeed.
Shopify is a free hosted application that gives you a customized website to sell your goods. If you only have a small amount of goods, you can probably stick to PayPal. This application basicly gives you a way to manage orders and inventory over top of a PayPal account, but it’s pretty darn slick and easy. They have great documentation on how to customize your store and even give your shopify account your own domain name. They charge 3% commission on everything you sell up to $10,000. After that they charge 2% commission.
This is shaping up to be a nice combination of apps to get an artist online with a fully functional website. Wordpress for sketch blogging and updates, Picasa for gallery, dfGallery for presentation of gallery on the website, and Shopify with PayPal for selling your goods. Then you can just do your thing and watch the money roll in from your artwork. Soon you will be able to jump from the Ramen to the real deal Lo Mein. Well… Maybe.