Ritu Sharma Art

A portfolio and sales website for a watercolour and oil painter. Homepage with a latest-work gallery preview and artist statement, a filterable masonry gallery (/artworks) by medium, availability and price, full artwork pages with the story and an inquiry form, plus About, Contact with commission requests, and Exhibitions.

The real design constraint wasn’t the front end — it was who maintains it. The artist needed to add and sell paintings, and edit her own About page, with zero technical knowledge and no phone call to me. So the CMS is a Sanity Studio embedded at /studio (no separate deployment), images go through Cloudinary, and there’s a plain-language guide that walks her through adding a painting start to finish. If the site needs a developer to update it, it’s a failed brief.

The decisions worth noting

• Placeholder-first. The site runs out of the box with empty placeholder content, so the whole UI could be built and reviewed before any real backend was wired up. Connecting Sanity + Cloudinary lights up the real gallery and emails.
• SEO taken seriously. Per-page metadata, dynamic OG images, VisualArtwork
  • Person JSON-LD, sitemap and robots — because a painter’s site that isn’t findable isn’t doing its one job.
• Escape hatches documented up front. A migration runbook for moving off any provider (especially Cloudinary) without re-uploading every image by hand, and a staged image-hardening playbook left deliberately un-applied so images stay full quality until traffic actually justifies compressing them.

Built on Next.js 16 (App Router), React 19, Sanity v6, Cloudinary, Tailwind, with Resend for inquiry emails (falling back to server logs when it’s not configured).