Toronto artist Beckie Di Leo balances a career in teaching and painting and has recently added live fashion illustrations to her repertoire. Drawing inspiration from popular culture, graphic design, street art and fashion, Beckie’s work has a contemporary and stylish flare. Her position as Arts Head has provided an opportunity to collaborate with local artists who in turn, work directly with her students through the TDSB “Specialist High Skills Majors” Program.

Beckie inquired about upgrading her website to a platform which would make it easy to share her fabulous content she creates but also have an easy way to organize & sell it. The website also had to be mobile friendly and allow her to update it using her phone any time.

My solution was to use WordPress with a responsive layout making it mobile & tablet friendly, but also to easily display large amounts of entries in a familiar and easy to use manner. Both Beckie & I really enjoy portfolio entries in the form of pins from Pintrest so that user experience (UX) shows in the portfolio layout sections of the site.

To allow Beckie to sell any items she wishes, I also installed Woocommerce while setting up and redesigning the website. I love this WordPress plugin to handle e-commerce functionality for clients and with it being a freemium plugin (free to use, but has premium add-ons) I include it whenever I can to save time & development costs.