One of the first things every new ArtFire member wants to do is to change the default ArtFire storefront to reflect the seller’s brand. ArtFire gives you several ways to “build your brand” on your store. Most of these can be found under the Edit My Studio section in the MyArtFire control panel. Once there, you will see several buttons in the Edit My Studio menu. As pointed out already in this series, the number of options you have to customize your storefront increases a lot from the Basic to Verified membership.

Studio Avatar

The first thing you will want to do is upload your store’s avatar. This avatar, sometimes called an ad button, is a 140 pixels square and will be displayed at the left top of your store. The name of your store is listed under the avatar, so you have the option to omit your store name from the design of your the avatar. However, this avatar is used in several other areas on ArtFire, such as the guilds and forums. Therefore, you will probably want to include your business name in the design, if at all possible. The reason that we upload this image first is because next we will be choosing a color scheme for our store. We can use our avatar as a guide when building a color scheme.

Color & Themes

This is the wizard that you will use to set your color scheme. The Basic membership gives you a choice of three themes and very little customization. With the Verified account, you can build your own color scheme from scratch or choose from a much larger group (at this time 21) of preset themes.

First, you will want choose a color for the top menu bar. You have a choice of 21 colors. Then you will set the Dark Background, Soft Background and Primary Font colors for the top of your store. Once you setup the colors, the preview of your storefront will be updated to reflect your choices. You do not need to switch between your storefront and the control panel while testing several color schemes. The preview shows how your avatar looks against these background colors.

Layout Options

Here you have a choice of a three or four column store. If you have few products for sale at first, you will probably want to switch from the default four column layout to the three column option, which puts more space between your product photos. When you product inventory increases, you can switch back to the four column layout.

ArtFire screenshots used by permission of Art Fire inc.