FreshWall Art marketplace
freshwall.pl

FreshWall
Art marketplace

A marketplace for artists and collectors built from scratch on a custom content management system: over 9,000 works, 5,800 creator and buyer accounts, 33,000 images and full moderation in a single panel.

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Performance
Accessibility
Best Practices
SEO

The strategic challenge

Creators selling their work online get lost in general classifieds sites, somewhere between car parts and furniture. What was missing was a place where art comes first: a clear gallery of works, an artist profile, buyer reviews and direct contact — with no middleman commission and no complicated checkout.

Solution architecture

  • Built from scratch, nothing off the shelf — a custom system on PHP 8 and Laravel. No ready-made classifieds script, no marketplace theme — every view and every module written for what creators and buyers actually need.
  • Custom content management system — an admin panel with listing moderation (approve and reject), account approval, report handling, ad slot management, SEO settings and a blog.
  • Artist profiles — every artist gets their own page with their works, buyer reviews and a "Follow" button, so fans are notified about new pieces.
  • 22 categories and 35 subcategories — paintings, posters, prints, photography, sculpture, handmade, antiques — filtered by price, city and category.
  • Direct contact — messages between buyer and creator, favourites, notifications and reporting of inappropriate content.
  • One-click sign-in with Google and Apple, plus GDPR-compliant export of your own data.

Under the hood

  • Images resized on the fly — the server delivers each image at exactly the size the screen needs. With over 33,000 photos that means a huge saving in transfer and much faster galleries.
  • Dedicated server — nginx, PHP-FPM, MariaDB and an SSL certificate configured from scratch, no shared hosting.
  • Expert blog for creators — guides on selling art online, choosing frames or SEO for artists, building organic traffic from Google.
  • Lighthouse (desktop): Performance 98, Accessibility 100, Best Practices 100, SEO 100.

The result

Over 9,000 works listed by 5,800 users, 33,000 images and more than 300 reviews of creators. The platform runs on its own lightweight codebase and is ready for further modules without rebuilding the whole thing.

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