Small Web Build of a little Cat Prints online store

For this month’s #SmallWebBuild, I made a little sample store for selling art prints.

The site’s structure is defined in a single file in the Origami site design language that turns the sample artwork images and data into a gallery home page and a separate page for each print.

I built this to try out Snipcart, a web service for adding a shopping cart to a static site. They seem to charge lower fees for this service than the larger site hosting platforms, and it was trivial to add the shopping cart with a few HTML attributes. I love that their approach leaves you in control of the rest of your site. That said, I haven’t signed up to use Snipcart to actually complete financial transactions; if you’re interested in Snipcart, investigate it carefully.

I also used this store site to experiment with the new web View Transitions API. I was able to create a zoom effect that works across page navigations (!) which is completely nuts. Caveats: currently in Chrome/Edge/Opera only; it was hard to figure out how to do what I wanted; Chrome sometimes shows a white flash before the zoom-out animation. Still, I’m excited to see these effects coming to simple multi-page sites.