The client
Teresa Maria Kemp is an East Neuk artist based in Fife, Scotland. Her work captures the vibrant colours and character of the East Neuk fishing villages — the harbours of St Monans, Pittenweem, Crail, and Anstruther — painted in acrylics with a bold, joyful folk art sensibility. She sells original paintings and prints directly to collectors across the UK and internationally.
The challenge
Teresa needed an online presence that could do two things simultaneously: showcase her artwork beautifully and sell it directly to buyers. Off-the-shelf e-commerce platforms either imposed their own visual identity on her work or required expensive monthly subscriptions with transaction fees on top. She needed something bespoke — a platform built around her paintings rather than around generic retail assumptions.
Design approach
The design deliberately sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from her paintings. A near-white warm paper background, Cormorant Garamond typography, thin ruled lines as the only decoration, and generous white space — so that when her bold, colourful folk art appears on the page it commands full attention. Nothing competes with the work. The result feels like a proper gallery rather than an online shop.
Custom gallery platform
We built the entire platform from scratch in plain PHP with no framework dependencies — designed to run on standard cPanel shared hosting without specialist infrastructure. Teresa manages her own artwork through a clean admin area: adding paintings, setting prices, marking originals as sold, managing print editions, and updating her artist biography and settings — all without touching any code.
Shopping cart and checkout
The platform includes a full shopping cart with session persistence, tiered shipping rates for UK, European, and international orders, and PayPal checkout integration. Buyers can purchase original paintings or prints, select their country for accurate shipping costs, and complete payment securely via PayPal. Order confirmation emails are sent automatically to both buyer and artist on successful purchase.
Artwork and inventory management
Each artwork has its own page with full-screen image view, dimensions, medium, price, and availability status. When an original painting sells, Teresa marks it as sold in the admin and the listing updates automatically. Print editions can be managed separately from originals with their own pricing and availability. The platform handles image upload, thumbnail generation, and display automatically.
The result
Teresa has a professional online gallery that reflects the quality of her work, with a direct sales channel that charges no platform commission beyond PayPal's standard transaction fee. The platform runs reliably on standard shared hosting, requires no technical knowledge to manage day-to-day, and gives her complete control over how her work is presented and sold.