Melody Sky

Melody Sky is a fine art landscape photographer, filmmaker and astrophotographer who has been based in Verbier, in the Swiss Alps, for more than twenty years. She began as an underwater photographer, spent years filming and directing ski films, and today makes fine art prints and runs night-sky experiences.

Her work sat on an ageing Squarespace site that did not introduce her and sold prints through a generic shop, with no way to picture a print on a wall. It could not hold her real range either: open editions in several materials, frames and glass, signed limited editions of seven, graphic art, gifts and gift vouchers. And it carried years of journal posts, press and links that Google already knew, which had to keep working.

She was also opening a gallery in Verbier in December, and wanted the new site live and selling before Christmas.

We designed the site around the photography: a restrained, gallery-like layout with large images and quiet type, in day and night themes. The site itself is custom-built in Next.js for speed, design and search. Shopify sits behind it for the cart, checkout, payments, taxes, orders and customer records, so Melody has a checkout buyers trust and an admin she can run herself, without being boxed into a shop theme. The two are joined by product code, so a price on the site and the price at checkout always match.

Melody prices her prints by format and material, not photograph by photograph. We turned her price sheets into one pricing model. Each photograph takes its format's sizes, materials and prices, with the sizes turned round for a portrait image, and one script writes both the site's prices and the Shopify import from the same source. At launch that was 71 products and 1,532 size and material options. A price change is one edit and one import. When she added a new 4:1 panoramic format the day after launch, it was a small change to the data.

Everything moved off Squarespace: products, journal posts, press and images. Every known old address still works: 100 redirect permanently to their new homes, and the journal kept the addresses it already had, so existing links carry over.

We ran design, engineering, the content migration and the search audit as one team, and reviewed everything before it went live. Each round of her feedback was turned round quickly, usually the same day, with a plain-English summary of what had changed.