title: “Studio Website (gallery public site)”

This guide covers the Studio Website module. If your gallery has not switched it on (the Owner does that in Settings → Extensions), this page will not match what you see — skip it for now.

Studio Website (gallery public site)

Category: Website. Not self-enable — CartonCrew turns this on for your gallery.

A public gallery website that runs off your own catalog. The works you already track are the works the public sees: mark a piece sold in the dashboard and it stops being for sale on the site the moment you do. There is no second system to keep in step, because there is no second system.

Status: complete and live.

Who it’s for

Galleries and studios on the Art Gallery / Studio plan. It replaces Website by Puck for those tenants — you get one or the other, not both, because this one is built around a catalog and that one is built around a nonprofit’s programmes.

What it gives you

• A public site on your own domain, served from your artwork catalog.
• Featured artists (as many as you like, in your order) and an ordered set of featured works for the front page.
• Every available work, image-first, with a high-resolution view.
• A SOLD mark that appears the moment you record the sale: bold, red and a size bigger than the text around it, so a visitor cannot miss it. The red is tuned to each theme so it stays readable on light and dark backgrounds alike.
• Artist profiles drawn from the same records your artists maintain themselves.
• Exhibitions rendered as online viewing rooms.
• Inquire on any available piece — captures the lead and tells you.
• Buy online, if you connect Square and choose Sell online: a cart, a Square-hosted checkout, and the piece marked sold when the money lands.
• News — gallery announcements with one post leading the homepage, a /news page of their own, and the newsletter signup.
• Parker, the site’s AI assistant, answering visitor questions from your own catalog.

What the public can and cannot see

This is worth being precise about, because the site is open to anyone with the URL and there is no login in front of it.

Shown:

Never shown, by construction:

• An artist’s email or phone.
• Commission and consignment rates — an artist’s terms are between them and you.
• Buyers and customers — names, emails, nothing.
• Valuation, location, provenance or condition notes. What a piece is worth to you and where it physically sits are not public.
• Works that are reserved, on loan, not for sale, or archived. Those states are yours; a visitor doesn’t get to infer them.
• Anything belonging to an archived artist, including their works.
• Anything belonging to an artist you have hidden from the website, including their works (see below).
• Unpublished pages.

Archiving an artist takes their works off the site with them, and removes their profile entirely — not just their directory entry. That is the fastest way to pull someone’s whole presence down if you need to.

Hiding a current artist does the same for the website, and nothing else. Artists (sidebar) → Artists → Edit on the artist → tick Hide this artist and their work from the website → Save changes. The artist leaves the directory and their profile page goes, and every one of their pieces leaves the Works page, the home page, featured works, show and exhibition pages, its own page, inquiries, Parker and the online shop. Your staff screens, the artist’s My Artwork and the gallery register keep the pieces, and the artist keeps their sign-in. Untick the box and save to bring everything back by itself. See Hiding an artist and their work from the website.

An artist who shows at more than one gallery is safe. If Mara shows with you and with another CartonCrew gallery, your site shows only your works by her, and theirs shows only theirs. Neither of you can see the other’s inventory, and neither profile page can be reached from the other’s site.

Inquiries

Every available piece has an Inquire button. Someone fills in their name, email and a message (the phone number is optional), and:

1. The inquiry is written down first.
2. Then you get an email — hit reply and it goes straight back to them.

That order matters. If email breaks, you still have the lead. You’ll never lose an inquiry because a mailbox bounced, and we record whether the notification actually went out rather than assuming it did.

Every inquiry also lands in the sidebar’s Contact screen, on the Inquiries tab (Contact → Inquiries; you need the Website Manager permission), so the email is a convenience rather than the only copy. You can see the piece, the message, their details, and move each one through new → read → responded → closed.

If an inquiry was never emailed to you, that tab says so, loudly — a red banner at the top and a red border on the inquiry itself, with the reason. That’s the point of it: the lead is safe either way, but you’d otherwise have no way of knowing nobody had told you. If you see “no gallery recipient”, your gallery has no owner or admin with a working email address — worth fixing.

A sold piece can’t be inquired about. Neither can reserved, on-loan or not-for-sale work.

What a visitor has to give before Send inquiry works. The Send inquiry button stays greyed out until they have written a message (at least a few characters, up to 2,000) and ticked the box that lets the gallery store their details and reply. A short line under the button says which of the two is still missing, so nobody is left wondering why it will not send. The server checks both again, so an inquiry that skips the form is refused the same way.

Spam protection. The inquiry form carries the same Cloudflare Turnstile check as your Contact page: most visitors never see it, and an automated sender that cannot pass it is refused before anything is saved or emailed to you. It sits alongside a hidden trap field and a limit on how many inquiries one address can send in a short time. If your gallery’s website moves to a domain of its own (not a cartoncrew.online address), tell us before it goes live: the domain has to be added to the Turnstile settings, or visitors on it cannot send inquiries or contact messages.

Consent

We ask two separate questions, and we never assume either:

• “The gallery may store my details and reply about this work.” Required — without it there’s nowhere lawful to keep their name, so there’s no inquiry.
• “Also send me news.” Optional, and off by default. Asking about a painting is not joining your mailing list.

Both are stored with a timestamp and how they were given, so if anyone ever asks why you hold their details, you have the answer.

Your artists are not emailed inquiries. The visitor agreed that you could contact them — passing their details to someone else, even the artist who made the piece, goes beyond that. If you want your artists copied in, talk to us: it needs the consent wording to change, not just a setting.

Stopping the emails, or correcting the address

Beside Remove my details, the footer’s Email preferences link lets a person stop your emails or correct the address you hold for them, from a link sent to their inbox. It answers the same sentence whoever is typed in, and what happens to the record is in Patrons: when someone stops themselves, how a corrected address is confirmed at the new address first, and the badge your staff see.

Removing their details themselves

Anyone whose details you hold can remove them without asking you. In the footer, right under the newsletter signup, the link Remove my details leads to a page that asks only for an email. Whatever they type, the page answers the same sentence — If we hold details for that address we have emailed you a link — so nobody can use it to find out who is on your list.

If the address is on file, they receive an email from your gallery with a link that works once, for one hour. Following it shows what will be removed (name, email, phone, address, notes, consent) and what stays (that a sale or an inquiry happened, with no name attached), and one button. Confirming removes them exactly as if you had pressed Erase on their page in Patrons, and the erasure is recorded in your audit with a one-way hash of the email — enough to answer “did you delete me?” later, never enough to recover the address.

A link that has been used, has expired, or was issued by another gallery shows This link has expired and changes nothing. The request page is rate-limited like the newsletter signup.

What the email looks like. It carries your logo — or, if you have not uploaded one, your gallery’s name set as a wordmark — over a short, plain message and a single dark Remove my details button, with the same link printed underneath in case their mail program blocks buttons or images. The footer is yours: your address, your public contact email, your legal line, and a link to your privacy policy once you have published it.

It says warmly that we are sorry to see them go, and then it gets out of the way. There is deliberately no are you sure?, nothing about what they will miss, and no offer to stay on a reduced footing — this is a data-rights request, your privacy policy promises not to penalize anyone for making one, and a nudge to reconsider is a soft way of doing exactly that. There is also no tracking pixel and no click tracking on this message: whether somebody opened it is not a number this gallery should be collecting.

Replies go to your public contact email when you have set one, so a person who answers the message reaches you rather than a no-reply mailbox.

The receipt they get afterwards

Confirming sends a second email: a short receipt saying the removal is done. It uses the same shell as the first one, so it plainly comes from your gallery.

This one matters more than it looks. Until it existed, somebody who closed the tab, lost signal, or simply did not read the page had no evidence at all that their request had gone through — and if they asked you, you could not easily check either, because the record you would have looked at had just been deleted. The receipt is the thing they keep.

It says what was removed and what you had to keep, as categories — never as contents. It does not greet them by name, does not mention their phone number or address, and does not say how many times they bought from you: a purchase count is itself a fact about a person, and this is the one message whose whole point is that those facts are gone. Like the first email it has no tracking pixel, no click tracking, and nothing inviting them back.

If the email cannot be sent, the removal still stands. Their right does not depend on a mail server having a good day, so nothing is undone and nothing is retried later. The page tells them plainly that the removal is complete but no confirmation could be sent, and your audit trail records the same thing, so you can see afterwards which erasures went out with a receipt and which did not.

One consequence worth knowing: this is the last message that address will ever receive from you. By the time it is sent, the address has already been deleted — it exists only for the instant it takes to send — so there is nothing to retry against and no copy kept anywhere afterwards.

Telling us what goes in that footer

Settings → Organization → Branding → Contact details on emails.

Every one of them is optional, and anything you leave blank is simply left out of the footer — no blank lines, no stray punctuation. None of it is a secret: it is the same information as your website footer and your front door.

Selling online (the store)

Inquiries turn a visitor into a conversation. The store lets them buy the piece there and then. It appears only once your gallery has connected Square (Settings → Square) and your Online sales setting is Sell online (see Online sales) — otherwise there is no cart, no checkout, and the public routes behave as though the store does not exist.

How a sale goes:

1. A visitor adds an available piece to the cart — the cart lives in the site header and survives moving between pages.

2. In the cart they choose how they will get it: Pick up at the gallery or Ship to me. Nothing is chosen for them, and Check out with Square stays greyed out until they pick one. A buyer who chooses Ship to me types their shipping address in the cart (name, street, city, state or region, ZIP or postal code, and country, with United States first), and the cart shows the shipping before they go on:

   • to any of the 50 states or Washington DC: Shipping: Free, and the total does not change;
   • anywhere else (another country, a US territory such as Puerto Rico or Guam, or a military APO/FPO/DPO address): your shipping charge per piece times the number of pieces, added to the total (see Shipping outside the United States);
   • if you have not set a charge, the cart tells them you do not ship outside the United States online, and to choose pickup or contact you. They cannot check out for shipping.

   For a shipped order the cart also shows the sales tax before they go on (see Sales tax on online orders).

3. Checkout hands them to a Square-hosted payment page. Card details never touch your site, and we never see them. Square does not ask for an address: the address they typed in the cart is the address on the order, and any shipping charge shows on Square’s page as Shipping.

4. From that moment the piece is held for 15 minutes, so two people cannot buy the same original while one of them is typing their card in. If they abandon the checkout, the hold expires by itself and the work goes back on sale — you don’t have to do anything.

5. When Square confirms the payment, the work is marked sold, leaves the for-sale grid, and the cart empties. You get an Online Sales Alert and an order notice email that say Local Pick Up or To be Shipped, with the buyer’s name, email and phone, and for a shipment where to send it (see Square → Sale Alerts).

6. The buyer lands on your site’s thanks page, which shows their pieces, Paid in full, Local Pick Up or To be Shipped, and when (Ready now, or after the show closes when the artist asked for that). For a pickup it also shows your address and opening hours (from Settings) and their 4-digit pickup code, which they give you when they collect the piece. It shows this only in the browser tab they paid from. Your gallery also emails them a confirmation with the same details, once per order.

Who bought it reaches Patrons. The buyer’s name and email — and, when they chose shipping, their phone and address — are added to Patrons. If they are already a patron (matched by email), CartonCrew only fills in what is missing: a name, phone or address your staff typed in is never replaced. A buyer who picks up gives Square their name and email but no address, so their patron record has no phone or address until you add one.

Originals are one-of-a-kind, and the store treats them that way. Each work pushed to Square carries a stock count of 1. Square stops selling it at the same moment you do, whether it sold on your website or on the gallery floor.

If checkout can’t run — Square not connected, a disconnected account, a work that sold a second earlier — the cart says so in plain words rather than failing silently.

Nothing here replaces your in-gallery sales. A piece sold on the floor and recorded in the dashboard leaves the website the same way; the two routes end in the same place.

News

Studio Site (left menu) → News is for the things a catalog can’t say: a new show opening, an award, a workshop, a change of hours.

• Write a post, publish it when it’s ready. Unpublished posts are drafts and never appear publicly.
• Feature one post to lead your homepage. Featuring another moves it - there’s no need to unfeature the old one first, and only ever one at a time. Feature nothing and the homepage shows your newest post, so the block is never empty.
• You can feature a draft (handy for staging tomorrow’s announcement); it won’t appear until you publish it, and the list says so.
• Goes live and Expires dates are optional on every post. Leave them empty and the post behaves as it always has: live as soon as you publish it, and up indefinitely. Set a live date to schedule something ahead of time; set an expiry so a reception announcement takes itself down afterwards.
• The list tells you which state each post is in - Draft, Scheduled, Live or Expired - so a post that isn’t showing always says why.
• Expiring isn’t unpublishing. The post moves to the archive on your News page and comes straight back if you clear the date.
• The full list lives at /news: current posts newest first, with anything expired tucked into a collapsed News archive underneath.
• Write nothing, or publish nothing, and the homepage block and the /news menu link simply don’t appear. A gallery that doesn’t want a news feed isn’t left with an empty one.
• The newsletter signup sits at the bottom of your /news page: a visitor enters their email and ticks the consent box, and they join your audience (Customers, with marketing consent recorded). Your email campaigns automatically include everyone who consented this way. Subscribing twice never creates a duplicate.

Your logo

Upload a logo under Settings > Branding and it replaces your gallery’s name in the top-left of every public page (linked home, sized to the header). No logo = your gallery name as text.

The same logo goes on the email we send on your behalf, and we size it there too, so you do not need to resize the file before uploading it. A wide logo will not stretch a sign-in code or a receipt out of shape in Outlook.

When someone bookmarks or shares your site

Your website carries your gallery’s name, not ours, everywhere a visitor or a link preview looks:

• The browser tab and bookmarks. The home page is titled with your gallery’s name. Every other page puts the page first, for example “Artists - Your Gallery” or “Calendar - Your Gallery”. A bookmark takes the title of the page it was made on.
• The tab icon and the phone home-screen icon. Your favicon, uploaded under Settings (left menu) → Organization → Branding → Favicon. With no favicon we use your logo, and with neither, a plain picture-frame icon.
• Link previews (a link pasted into a text message, email, Slack or a social post). The preview shows your gallery’s name and the page title, a short description, and a picture:
  • the description is the subheadline from the Homepage card (Studio Site (left menu) → Pages → Homepage), else its headline, else the start of your welcome text;
  • the picture is your first banner image, else your logo.

Only images you uploaded are used in previews; a pasted link to a picture somewhere else is left out. Previews are cached by the apps that show them, and by us for about five minutes, so a change can take a little while to appear in a new preview. A link that was already shared keeps the preview the app saved at the time.

Images

Page images (like the About hero) are uploaded, not linked: pick a file (JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF, max 5 MB) and it is stored with your site and served from our image host. Links to images on other websites will not display — the site’s security policy blocks them.

Archiving an artist removes their photo for good. Their profile photo is taken down when you archive or delete them - not hidden, deleted. That is what makes the photo stop being reachable by anyone who saved the link. The consequence to know before you archive: if you bring the artist back later, the photo is gone and they will need to upload it again.

Artist profile photos are resized as you upload them. They are shown as small round portraits in the directory and as a larger square portrait at the top of the artist’s own page, beside their name, media and bio — never larger than that — so a full-size camera photo is scaled down in your browser before it is sent. You still pick whatever file you have; what gets stored is a fraction of the size, which is what keeps your artists list quick to open. Nothing about how the photo looks changes. An artist with no photo shows the same initials badge the directory uses.

Membership applications

Your site serves an application form at /apply (link it from Get Involved or Join Us with a /apply button). Applicants give their contact details (US phone format), a portfolio link or up to four images of current work, and answer why-membership and practice questions. Every application lands in Artists → Membership applications: talk to the applicant, record who spoke and when (the history can never be silently edited), present to your jury, then accept or decline (declining records the reason). Upload your contract PDF (with SignNow text tags - the applicant as Client, you as Company) on the same screen; accepting an application then emails the applicant a signing link, and once they have signed you countersign from the application with one click. A declined or lapsed contract puts the application back in presenting-to-jury and emails you.

For member artists

The footer of every page carries Member sign in, which opens your gallery’s member portal (email code sign-in). Members manage their profile and bio, their artwork inventory and photos, and volunteer signups there. Someone who is not a member gets a friendly explanation rather than an error.

A Calendar Login link

If your members are used to a link that opens only the shift calendar, you can add one beside Member sign in. In Studio website → Pages → Footer:

• Also show a Calendar Login link, which opens only the shift calendar after signing in — tick it to add the second link.
• Calendar link wording — what the link says. Leave it empty for “Calendar Login”.
• Member sign-in link wording — rename the first link if you like (for example “Member Login”). Leave it empty for “Member sign in”.

Then Save and publish the footer.

Both links use the same sign-in: each member types their own email address and gets a 6-digit code. There is no shared password. After signing in, Calendar Login shows the member a simple calendar screen with big buttons and plain instructions — their shifts, the month, taking a shift, and “I can’t make it” — and nothing else. The same rules apply there as on the member portal’s Calendar page. The screen gives the Calendar Manager’s email address as the place to ask for help (your Calendar Managers, or your owners and admins if nobody holds that role).

Opening hours

Studio Site (left menu) -> Hours is where you set the days and times you’re open: for each day, either an opening and closing time, or leave both empty to mark it Closed.

• Your Visit page shows them as a week, including the days you’re closed - a visitor should be able to see that Monday is shut, not just fail to find it.
• The What’s On calendar shades your closed days, so a show opening or ending on one is visibly a day nobody can come.
• The Hours box on the Visit page itself still shows if you haven’t filled in the week. Once you have, it stops being displayed - otherwise your hours appear twice, in two formats. Nothing you’ve written there is changed or deleted, and it comes straight back if you clear the week.
• If that box said something the week can’t - “closed public holidays”, “January by appointment” - put the dates under Closed or open on a particular date (below), or move the wording into the Visit page’s main text, where it will keep showing alongside the week.
• Your footer shows the same week on every page, shortened: days with the same hours are grouped into one line (“Wednesday - Sunday: 11am - 7pm”), and the days you’re shut are named rather than left out. Nothing to type — it comes from the week you set here.
• Clear every day and the week disappears, going back to just your written hours.

Seasonal hours

If you keep different hours at different times of year, Studio Site (left menu) -> Hours -> Seasonal hours (under the week) lets you name seasons, each with its own week.

• Press Add a season, give it a Name (“Summer”), pick the first month in From and the last month in To, fill in that season’s days and times (leave a day empty to mark it Closed), and press Save seasons.
• A season runs from the first day of its first month to the last day of its last month: April to September covers April 1 through September 30. A season can run past December - October to March covers October 1 through March 31.
• Seasons cannot overlap. If two seasons share a month, nothing is saved and the page names both seasons and the month.
• Months no season covers use your normal week above, and the page tells you which months those are - or that your seasons cover the whole year.
• Which season applies is decided by your gallery’s own date (its timezone), not the visitor’s clock.
• Your Visit page and footer show the hours in force today, with the season’s name (“Summer hours”), and the next change with the date it starts (“From Thursday, October 1: Winter hours”). Your What’s On calendar shades each month by its own season.
• Everything that uses your hours uses the season for the date in question: Gallery Shifts months, when a member can drop a shift, “who is on duty today”, the member calendar’s closed days and the returns window at the till.
• A date under Closed or open on a particular date (below) still wins over a season.
• Seasonal hours are public on your website the same way your week is.

Closed or open on a particular date

Under the week on the same page, Closed or open on a particular date is for the days the week gets wrong: a holiday, the week of a rehang, a private hire, or a private view on a day you are normally shut.

• Choose Closed or Open, pick the date in From (and a last date in To for a range, up to a year), add a Reason if you like, and press Add closure (or Add opening). An opening also needs the times you open and close that day.
• A date here overrides the week for that date. A Saturday you have closed is closed even though Saturdays are open; a Monday you have opened is open with the times you gave.
• Your What’s On calendar shades a closed date and does not shade an opened one, and your Visit page lists what is coming up under Coming up, with the reason. The reason is public, so write it for visitors.
• Gallery Shifts leaves a closed date unticked when it builds a month, and ticks an opened date with its own times. “Who is on duty today” names nobody on a closed date.
• If the gallery already has shifts on the dates you are closing, you are told which shifts, and nothing is deleted. Press Record the closure and keep the shifts to save it anyway, then move or remove those shifts yourself.
• Dates that have passed cannot be added. Remove takes one off.
• Only an owner or admin can add or remove them.

There’s deliberately no “open now” indicator: we don’t hold your timezone, and a badge that’s wrong for someone reading from another country is worse than no badge at all.

Calendar

Your website’s Calendar opens on the Month view, showing the current month, on a phone as well as on a computer or tablet. There is no List view: visitors switch between Month, Exhibitions and (when you have published news) News with the buttons above it. An old link that ends in ?view=list opens the month, and so does a link with a view name nobody recognizes.

Seeing what is on a day. Today is picked when the Calendar opens. A visitor clicks (or taps) any day in the month, and that day’s panel lists everything on it:

• an event or a reception, with its type, name, time, place, description and an Add to calendar link;
• an exhibition on that day, including a show that opened on an earlier day and is still running, with a View exhibition link;
• a class on that day, with a View class link.

A day with nothing on says Nothing on this day. On a wide screen (1024 pixels and up) the panel sits to the right of the month; on a phone or a narrow tablet it sits below the month, and a tap on a day scrolls down to it. An exhibition’s name in the grid is still a link straight to the exhibition’s page.

The Month view shows published events and live exhibitions land on their days. A run that lasts several days is marked at its Opens and Ends days rather than filling every square between - so a month with one long show still has room to show the one-day events, and the calendar isn’t claiming the show is on during days you’re closed. A show running right through a month with neither end falling in it appears once on the 1st, marked Continues. Subscribe to calendar adds your gallery’s feed to a visitor’s calendar app (or they can paste the feed URL). The feed always carries what is published right now, with full date ranges; how soon a subscriber’s calendar shows a change depends on their app (see below). It opens a short list: Outlook.com, Outlook (work or school), Google Calendar and Apple Calendar (iPhone, Mac). Each opens that app’s own add-a-calendar page, and the calendar arrives named after your gallery. Times are correct in every app once your gallery’s timezone is set (Studio Site in the left menu, then Who is in the gallery today, the field Your gallery’s timezone); without one, Outlook may show timed events several hours out.

How soon a subscribed calendar shows changes

A subscribed calendar is copied by the subscriber’s app on its own schedule, so an event you add or change on your website reaches their calendar later, not instantly:

• Google Calendar: usually every 8 to 24 hours. Google sets its own schedule and ignores the refresh hint in our feed, so neither the gallery nor the subscriber can speed it up.
• Outlook (Outlook.com and Microsoft 365): typically a few hours, sometimes up to about a day.
• Apple Calendar (iPhone and Mac): on a Mac, the subscriber chooses how often it refreshes in that calendar’s settings, from every few minutes to weekly. An iPhone follows its own background schedule.

If a visitor needs a change straight away, point them to the website’s Calendar page, which is always current.

Contact form

Once your Contact page is published it carries a message form (name, email, phone, message, and a short notice that the gallery will store the details to reply). Messages land in the Contact inbox in the sidebar - not in the artwork inquiries, which stay under Artwork Catalog - and the gallery’s owners and admins are emailed when one arrives. If that email ever fails, the message is still saved and waiting in the inbox. See The Contact inbox. Bots are filtered by a hidden trap, a rate limit, and (when configured) a Cloudflare Turnstile check.

Exhibitions

Your shows become viewing rooms on the site: run dates, your text, and the works in the order you hung them, each with its wall label.

A show is private until you publish it. There’s a separate Published switch on every exhibition, and it starts off. It is deliberately not the same as the show’s status:

• A planned show can be published — that’s how you announce something months ahead.
• An open show can stay unpublished — a private viewing you’d rather not advertise.
• A closed show usually stays published — it becomes your archive of past exhibitions.

If publishing were tied to status, you’d have no way to announce a show early or keep a private one quiet, and you’d likely find out by seeing something on the internet you hadn’t announced.

Sold works still appear in a show — a past exhibition is a record of what was in it, and a room full of “Sold” is a good look. They’re marked SOLD in bold red and never show a price. Reserved, on loan and not-for-sale works don’t appear on a show page at all.

An open-call show (the Show tick box) has its own section. From its Show on the website from date (its start date when that is blank), in your gallery’s timezone, to its end date it gets its own item in the site menu and a button in your homepage banner after your own two buttons, both named with the show’s title, and its page and pieces are public from that same day. It is not announced before then. While it runs, its pieces appear only on its page, not on the Works page, the homepage or artists’ pages, and a show artist’s piece is on your website only while it is in a running show. The details are in the Exhibitions & Shows guide, under An open-call show on your website.

Browsing the works

The Works page is a browsable catalog rather than one long grid. Visitors can search by title or artist, filter by artist and by medium, sort the results, and see how many works match what they have chosen. The filters reflect your actual catalog — a medium only appears as an option if one of your available works uses it. A piece saved with structured medium (Settings → Taxonomy) is listed under its Medium (Painting), and its card and page say it in plain words (Oil on canvas); other pieces show their medium text as typed.

On any artwork page, Previous / Next moves through that artist’s other works without going back to the grid first. The chain follows the same order as their profile, stops cleanly at each end, and doesn’t appear at all for an artist with a single piece.

How a picture is shown. On a piece’s own page (open your website, click Works, then click the piece), the featured work on your front page and an exhibition’s banner, the picture is shown whole, at its own proportions, edge to edge with no box or band of color around it; a tall picture is scaled down to fit the screen, never stretched. Click the picture on a piece’s page to see it enlarged: it is still the whole picture at its own proportions, with no crop and no bars, sized to fit the screen, and Close sits above it rather than over a corner. Press Close (or Escape) to go back. On the works grid, the front page and each artist’s page, every card is square and the picture fills it, so a painting that isn’t square is trimmed at the edges there; the whole picture is one click away. A piece with no photo yet is not on the website at all (see the table at the top of this page), and one whose photo can’t be loaded shows Image unavailable.

A white border around the picture itself is trimmed off. Some picture files carry the band inside them: a picture that came through the Square catalog import is a square file, so a wider or taller photo arrives padded to a square with white, and a product photo shot on white has white on all four sides. When a picture is uploaded on an artwork form, or copied in by the Square or bulk import, a solid white band along an edge is cut off before the picture is stored, so the piece shows at the photo’s own proportions. The rule is deliberately careful: only a band that is at least 2% of that side is trimmed (a thin white edge, like a photographed frame or mat, is kept); never more than 45% of a side in total is removed (a picture that is mostly white is left exactly as it is); a picture that is white all over is left alone; and a band that is not white (cream, grey or black) is not trimmed; nor is a transparent margin, and a GIF is never touched. A picture with no such band is stored exactly as it came. Artist photos, your logo, banner images and notice images are never trimmed. Pictures stored before this existed keep their bands until the gallery asks us to repair them, which is done once per gallery, with a before-and-after sheet to check first and every original picture kept.

See it on your wall

A wall-hung work gets a See it on your wall button on its artwork page, so a visitor can judge whether a 24 × 36 inch piece works above their sofa.

• On an iPhone or iPad, the button opens Apple’s own viewer (Quick Look) with the piece placed on the visitor’s real wall at its true size.
• On an Android phone, it opens Google’s Scene Viewer the same way.
• On a computer, or any device that cannot do either, it shows the piece to scale beside a photo of a standard sofa and of a person 173 cm (5 ft 8 in) tall (the same two photos on every gallery’s site), with its size stated in your unit, and a QR code that opens the same page on a phone.

When the button appears. Only for a work the public can already see on its artwork page (available, or sold), that hangs on a wall (not sculpture, ceramics, jewelry or glass), whose image is a JPEG or PNG, and whose size the preview can work out. There is no greyed-out button: if any of those is missing, the button simply is not there.

Where the size comes from. From the work’s Height, Width and Depth in inches, when it has them. A piece saved before those boxes existed, and not yet converted with Fix dimensions, is read from its old Dimensions text: a size that says its unit (24 x 36 in, 60 x 90 cm) is read as written; one that does not (24 x 36) is read in your gallery’s unit. Numbers are read height first, as galleries write them. Remember to measure with the frame.

How a size reads on the site. Every artwork page, the works list and the plain-text page for search tools show the size one way: 24 × 30 in, fractions as 1 1/4 × 1/2 in, a depth as 9 × 7 × 7 in.

Fixing a work with no button. Studio Site (left menu) → Featured → See it on your wall lists every available wall-hung work the preview cannot size, each linking to the work in the Artwork Catalog. Open the work: under Dimensions the form says what it reads the size as, or that it cannot read one. Either enter its Height and Width, or open Wall preview size (overrides Dimensions) under it and type the width and height (and depth, if you like) in cm or in. A size set there wins; clear it and the preview goes back to what Dimensions reads as. Members see what their Dimensions reads as on their own form, but only staff can set the override.

Your unit, and switching it off. In the same See it on your wall card, choose Inches or Centimeters for sizes with no unit written, or untick Offer See it on your wall on artwork pages to switch the preview off for the whole site. Press Save wall preview. Switching it off loses no sizes.

Online sales: sell, or show prices with Inquire

Galleries differ on this, so it is yours to set rather than ours to assume. One setting decides how your website sells, and it replaces the old Show prices switch, so there is one place to look.

To change it: Studio Site (left menu) → Featured → Online sales, choose one of the three, then press Save featured, sold and online sales. Owners, admins and anyone with the Website Manager capability can change it; nobody else can, and the server refuses the change too.

• Sell online: prices, Add to cart, the cart and checkout (see Selling online). This needs Square connected (Settings → Square Integration). If Square is not connected, the screen says so and your website behaves as Show price + Inquire until it is.
• Show price + Inquire: every available work shows its price, with no Add to cart and no cart. Visitors use Inquire about this piece instead, which reaches you as an inquiry like any other.
• No price + Inquire: your pieces are on the website with no price anywhere: every work reads Price on application, with Inquire about this piece.

It is one setting for the whole gallery, not per work. The price is not merely hidden on the page in No price + Inquire: it never leaves our server, on any page, in the chat assistant’s answers, or in the raw data behind the site. And outside Sell online the checkout itself refuses a new order, so nobody can buy by sending a request by hand.

What you had before carries over. Until you choose, your website keeps behaving exactly as it did: if you had prices switched off it is No price + Inquire; if Square is connected it is Sell online; otherwise **Show price

• Inquire**. Nothing changes until you press save.

Changing it while someone is paying. A visitor who already pressed Check out with Square before you changed it can still finish paying on Square’s page: the sale is recorded, the piece is marked sold, and the artist is paid exactly as for any online sale. Nobody can start a new cart or checkout after the change.

Your register is not affected. The in-gallery register and your Square connection work the same in all three choices. A private purchase link you send for a commissioned piece also keeps working, since it is not part of the website store.

A sold work never shows a price regardless.

Online only pieces: buy online, or “I wish to purchase this piece”

A piece whose Showing venue is Online only is on your website but not on your walls. You decide whether such pieces can be bought online.

To change it: Studio Site (left menu) → Featured → Online only pieces, tick or untick Online-only pieces can be bought online, then press Save online-only piece settings. It is off for every gallery until you turn it on. Owners, admins and anyone with the Website Manager capability can change it; the server refuses anyone else, and every change is recorded in Settings → Recent activity.

• On: an Online only piece is bought like any other piece (Add to cart and checkout, as Online sales allows).
• Off: an Online only piece still shows on your website, marked Online only, with no Add to cart. Its page shows I wish to purchase this piece instead. The checkout, the shipping quote and a private purchase link all refuse the piece, even when someone sends the request by hand, and nothing is held or charged. Inquire about this piece stays on the page and works exactly as before.

It applies to every Online only piece straight away, old and new: nothing about a piece is changed when you switch it.

What the visitor fills in. I wish to purchase this piece opens a short form: name, email and phone (all three required; the phone is typed as (555) 123-4567 and must be a 10-digit US number) and an optional message. It says “The online sales team will get back to you in three business days (note, the gallery business days are Wednesday to Sunday).”, with the days taken from your Opening hours (if you have not set opening hours, the part in brackets is left out). Above the Send request button it says “We’ll use these details only to contact you about this inquiry, unless you choose to receive our newsletter below.” A box Send me (your gallery’s name)‘s newsletter, unticked, adds them to your newsletter only if they tick it, the same way your website’s newsletter signup does (someone who unsubscribed is never added back). The form has the same robot check as your other forms, and a sold or held piece cannot be requested.

Who gets the requests. Under Online purchase request recipients, tick the staff who should receive them. Each request arrives in their artMail inbox (in their member portal) with the visitor’s name, email, phone, message and a link to the piece. Only staff who also have a member record at your gallery can be ticked, because artMail reaches member records; anyone else is shown greyed out with the reason. If you tick nobody, requests are emailed to your owners and admins instead. If an artMail message cannot be delivered (for example because the visitor’s message contains what looks like a card or Social Security number, which artMail never sends), the request is emailed to your owners and admins instead, so someone is always told. Each request is also saved under Contact → Inquiries, marked purchase request, before anyone is told, so a failed notification never loses it.

Available to buy online, for one piece

You can let one Online only piece be bought online while the gallery setting stays off. Open the piece in Artwork Catalog, click Edit, and under Online purchase tick Available to buy online. People who receive purchase requests but do not use the Artwork Catalog can do the same on the Online purchase requests page (the link is in each request’s artMail message). Staff who can edit artwork and your named recipients can see and change it; nobody else can.

• Turning it on gives the piece Add to cart and checkout, removes I wish to purchase this piece, and emails everyone who sent a purchase request for that piece, once each, at the same moment: “(Piece) is now available to buy”, telling them that pieces go to whoever completes checkout first, with a View and buy button to the piece’s page. Only an available piece that is for sale on your website can be turned on: it needs a photo, an artist who is not hidden from the website, and (for a show artist’s piece) a running show, and it cannot still be Arriving. Your gallery must also be selling online (Online sales set to Sell online, with Square connected); otherwise the switch is refused with the reason and nobody is emailed.
• Turning it off puts the piece back to purchase requests only and emails nobody.
• Turning it on again emails only people who have not been told yet: people who asked since the last time, and anyone whose email did not go through last time. Someone who was told is not emailed again.

Every change is recorded in Settings → Recent activity.

Commissioned pieces

A piece made to order for one person is a commissioned piece. On your website it shows Commissioned Piece where its price would be, on the Works page, the work’s own page, the artist’s page and your homepage, and the work page shows Commissioned Piece instead of Add to cart. Its price never leaves our server, and the online store refuses it however someone tries: a cart saved before it became a commission, or a request made by hand, is told ”… is a commissioned piece and cannot be bought online. Please contact the gallery.” and nothing is held or charged.

A piece is a commission when its sale classification is Commission work:

• the artist ticks Is this a commission? on the piece in the member portal (My Artwork → New artwork, or Edit), or
• you set it: in the sidebar open Artwork Catalog, click Edit on the piece’s row, set Sale classification to Commission work and click Save changes.

To put a piece back on sale online, change its Sale classification to anything else (or none) the same way and click Save changes; the price and Add to cart come back.

Selling a commissioned piece at the gallery’s Register works exactly as before, and it is paid at your Commission work rate.

Sending the buyer a private purchase link

The person a commission was made for can buy it online through a private link that only Owners, Admins and Treasurers can send:

1. In the sidebar open Artwork Catalog and click Edit on the piece’s row (or click its title). The piece must be Available and its Sale classification must be Commission work.
2. Under Purchase link, type the buyer’s email in Buyer email.
3. Press Send purchase link, check the name of the piece and the address in the confirmation, and press Yes, send it.

The buyer gets an email, “Your private link to buy …”, with a Buy your piece button. It opens a page on your website showing that piece at its price; they choose Pick up at the gallery or Ship to me (typing their address, with shipping worked out exactly as in the cart) and press Buy with Square, which is your normal online checkout for that one piece. The order then arrives like any online order (Sale Alerts, the order notice, the artist’s sold email), and the artist is paid at your Commission work rate.

The link:

• works once and expires 14 days after it is sent;
• buys only that piece, and only on your website;
• stops working if the piece sells another way (for example at the Register), if its Sale classification is changed away from Commission work, or if the artist unticks Is this a commission?.

Back under Purchase link you see the status (Sent, not used yet, Used, Canceled, Expired or Ended, with the reason), who it was sent to, when, and when it expires. To send it again, type the address and press Resend purchase link: the earlier link stops working. To stop it, press Cancel link. Sending and canceling are recorded in Recent activity. The link itself is never shown to staff and is never stored: if the buyer loses the email, resend it.

An artist can ask you to send it: on their piece in the member portal they press Ask the gallery to send the purchase link, and your Owners, Admins and Treasurers get an email “Purchase link requested: …”. Nothing is sent to the buyer until one of you sends the link.

Shipping outside the United States

Online orders ship free to the 50 states and Washington DC. An order going anywhere else (another country, a US territory, or a military APO/FPO/DPO address) pays your shipping charge per piece, times the number of pieces in the order. Out of the box no charge is set, which means your website does not take shipped orders outside the United States: the buyer is asked to choose pickup or contact you.

To set it (Owner or Admin):

1. In CartonCrew, choose Studio Site in the left menu.
2. Stay on the Featured section (the first one along the top) and scroll down to Shipping outside the United States.
3. Type the amount per piece in dollars and cents in Shipping outside the United States, per piece ($), for example 45 or 45.50 (up to 10,000). Leave it blank to stop shipping outside the United States online.
4. Press Save shipping.

Everyone else sees the amount but cannot change it. The charge is worked out by CartonCrew from the address the buyer typed, never from anything their browser sends, and it is shown in the cart, on Square’s payment page (as Shipping), on the thanks page and in the buyer’s confirmation email. It is never part of the piece’s price: the sale, the artist’s commission and their payout are all on the piece price alone. The Online Sales Alert and the order notice say what the buyer paid toward shipping each piece.

Sales tax on online orders

How much sales tax an online order carries depends on how the buyer gets it:

The cart shows a shipped order’s tax before checkout, for example Sales tax (WA 9.8%) $49.00, or Sales tax $0.00 (no tax, shipping out of state), and Square’s payment page charges the same rate. CartonCrew works the rate out from the address the buyer typed, never from anything their browser sends.

If the Department of Revenue cannot place a Washington address exactly (it finds only the ZIP code, or nothing), or does not answer within 5 seconds, the order is not sent without tax and no other rate is guessed: the buyer is asked to check the address, try again, or choose Pick up at the gallery. Nothing is held for them until it works.

Every online sale records how its tax was decided: the rate, where it came from (the Washington address rate, out of state, outside the United States, or your own rate), and for a Washington address the Department of Revenue’s four-digit location code, its answer code and the rate period (for example Q42026), and the tax charged on each piece. These stay on the sale for your records even if the buyer later asks to have their details erased. You see it on the order in Artwork Catalog → Online Sales Alerts, for example Sales tax: Washington, 9.8% (DOR location 3406, Q42026), so you can report sales tax by location.

This is not tax advice. Confirm with your accountant that this is the right treatment for your gallery’s sales.

Images

Artwork images live in a private store. The site never links to them directly — it mints a short-lived signed link per visit. Copying an image URL out of the page gives someone a link that stops working; it does not give them the door key.

Setting it up

1. Ask CartonCrew to enable Studio Website for your gallery. It isn’t in the self-serve marketplace.
2. Point your domain at us (same as Website by Puck — bring your DNS, we issue the certificate).
3. Replace the starter text on your pages, then publish them. Your site already has its pages when it is handed over — see What a new gallery starts with.
4. Go to Studio Site (left menu) and choose your featured artists and works.
5. Keep your catalog accurate. That is keeping the website accurate.

Studio Site (left menu)

Everything you control about the public site lives on this tab, split into four sections along the top. Each section saves on its own, and its save button says what it saves — so you never have to work out which of several buttons covers the change you just made. A dot next to a section name means it holds edits you haven’t saved; leaving that section asks before it lets them go.

• Featured — featured artists, featured works, the sold-works switch and Online sales. One save covers all four. Below them, See it on your wall has its own save (see See it on your wall), and so does Shipping outside the United States (see Shipping outside the United States).
  • Featured artists lead the front page, in the order you set (add, remove and reorder freely). Only artists your public site can show are offered: someone who has left, someone hidden from the public site, and someone archived are all left out of the list, because featuring them would change nothing. Clear their end date, unhide them or restore them and they can be featured again.
  • Featured works — up to 12, and the order is the order: number 1 leads the front page. Only available works by a current artist who is not hidden from the public site are offered — a piece by someone who has left, or by someone you have hidden, is not, for the same reason the front page won’t render it. The picker and the page apply the same three rules (left, hidden, archived) to artists and to works alike.
  • Online sales — Sell online, Show price + Inquire, or No price + Inquire (see Online sales).
• Theme — your site’s look. Picking one of the built-in themes applies it immediately; the custom theme has its own save because you are editing colors rather than choosing a preset.
• Pages — About, Visit, Contact, the footer and the Homepage card. Each page is its own card with its own save, because they are separate pages.
• News — your gallery’s news posts.

You need the Website Manager capability (owners and admins have it). Without it the tab won’t appear — and the server refuses the change too, so it isn’t just a hidden button.

If a featured piece sells, it simply stops showing. You don’t have to come back and remove it. It stays in your featured list, and it will reappear if the sale is ever undone.

Someone you featured who has since left stays in your list, marked with why. They are no longer offered for a new selection, but the choice you already made is not thrown away — the row stays where you put it and reads Not showing on the site — they have left the gallery, clear their end date to show them again. The same applies to an artist you hide or archive after featuring them, and to a featured work whose artist has left or been hidden. This is deliberate: if they come back, they reappear on the front page by themselves, and in the meantime you can still see and explain why the page looks the way it does. Saving other changes on the Featured card does not require you to remove them first.

A piece you haven’t photographed yet is not on the website. Not on your Works page, the artist’s page, its own page, the home page or anywhere else, so visitors never see an empty frame. The Artwork Catalog says Not on the website yet - waiting for a photo on it, and the dashboard’s available-for-sale number says how many are waiting for a photo. Add the photo and it appears by itself. (If an image is uploaded but genuinely won’t load, it says Image unavailable instead - that one is worth investigating.)

The homepage’s Latest works strip only shows pieces you’ve photographed, like every other part of the website.

A featured piece with no image doesn’t show either. On the front page the image is the content, so a work still awaiting photography is held back rather than shown as an empty frame. Same as with a sale: it stays in your featured list and appears by itself once you add a photo.

Exhibitions

Publish an exhibition (“Show on your website” on the exhibition form) and it appears under Exhibitions as an online viewing room. Artists you feature on the exhibition show with their photo, name and bio between the exhibition details and the works.

The Featured Artists tab

Your website’s top menu, and the phone menu, show Featured Artists right after Artists whenever a current or upcoming exhibition has a featured artist. The page lists them under two headings:

• Now showing: exhibitions running today.
• Upcoming: exhibitions that have not started yet, soonest first.

Each artist shows their photo and name and links to their profile. Each exhibition shows its title and dates and links to its page. “Today” is your gallery’s own date, in the time zone you set for the gallery, so a show opens on your calendar day rather than at midnight UTC.

To put an artist there, open the exhibition (Exhibitions & Shows (left menu) → the exhibition → Edit details), tick Feature artist(s), add them, and make sure Show on your website is ticked. Artists appear in the order you add them.

What keeps someone off the tab:

• The exhibition has ended, is not on your website, or has a Show on the website from date still to come. A Show (open-call show) appears from its opening day, never before.
• An exhibition with no start or end date has no “now”, so it is left out.
• The artist is hidden from the public site, archived, or no longer a member.

When nobody qualifies, the tab disappears from the menu. Anyone following an old link to the page sees “There are no featured artists at the moment” rather than an error.

The tab is only for exhibitions. The featured artists you choose for your front page (Studio Site (left menu) → Featured) are not part of it.

Choosing when a show goes live

Next to the Show on your website switch there is an optional Show on the website from date. Set it and a published exhibition stays off the public site until that day, then appears by itself - no further action. Leave it blank (or clear it) to go live immediately. The exhibitions list shows scheduled for so you can tell at a glance. Unpublished shows stay hidden regardless of any date.

Themes

Your public site ships in Gallery Minimal — warm off-white, serif headlines, image-first. Pick a different look any time from Studio Site → Theme: Bold Contemporary (dark, high contrast), Classic (white, serif, burgundy) or Warm & Personal (cream and terracotta). A theme changes colors and type only, never your content, and you can change it as often as you like — the public site follows on the next refresh.

Custom theme

Want your own colors? Pick the Custom card in the theme picker: choose your background, card background, text, muted text, accent, accent hover and line colors (plus a headline font), then Save and use custom theme. Your colors must actually read - text and accent each need WCAG 4.5:1 contrast against the background, and saving is refused until they do. Your custom colors are kept even while a built-in theme is active, so you can switch back and forth.

Join Us / Call to Artists

The Join Us card writes a recruiting page at /join — heading, your membership pitch and how to apply, and an optional prospectus link (any https address; host the PDF wherever you already do — it renders as a “View the prospectus” button). Publish it and a Join Us link appears in the site navigation; unpublish it and both the page and the link disappear.

Artists by medium

The public Artists page groups your artists by medium — the way co-op galleries present them — with an A–Z view one click away. Groups come from the works themselves: an artist appears under every medium they currently have available work in (a painter-ceramicist shows under both), and an artist with nothing on the catalog right now appears only in the A–Z list. There is nothing to configure; add or sell works and the groups follow. An artist page shows Member since March 2019 under the name of a current member whose start month and year are on their artist record (Member since 2019 when only the year is set), unless the artist has hidden it on My Profile or you have ticked Hide ‘Member since’ on their profile on their artist record. Guest and show artists, and anyone with an end date, never show it, and it never appears on the Artists page itself (see the artist roster). On an artist page, visitors can sort the works by title, year or price (newest stays the default). Under Studio Site → Featured → Sold works you can choose to showcase sold pieces there too: they show a bold red SOLD instead of a price, and their inquiry form keeps working as a way for a visitor to reach you about that artist. Leave the switch off and sold pieces stay hidden, exactly as before.

The Artists page is two lists. Member Artists come first: every current member, whether or not they have a work for sale right now. Guest Artists sit underneath: your guest artists, listed only while your gallery has at least one of their works marked available and showing on the Works page (a piece held inside a running show does not count). Sell or archive a guest’s last available work and they leave the page on their own; mark a new one available and they are back. The Guest Artists heading only appears when there is someone to list. Each list keeps the By medium / A–Z views, and the name search and medium filter narrow both lists together.

Show artists are not on the Artists page. An artist whose relationship is show is not listed there, even with pieces for sale, and there is no Show pill. Nothing else about them changes: their own artist page still opens (from the show’s page, for example), and their pieces stay in the show and for sale there.

Every artist on the page carries a small icon next to their name: a house for a member artist (members keep the gallery’s lights on), a suitcase for a guest artist and an easel for a show artist. The same icon shows on the artist’s own page, on an exhibition’s Featuring list and on the homepage featured artists, with a legend line explaining whichever icons appear there. Set the relationship on the artist (member, guest, or show) and the icon follows. An archived, hidden or former artist is not on the website, so carries no icon anywhere.

The Artists page filters sit on two rows above the lists:

• Row 1: the name search (it takes the rest of the row), the Mediums dropdown and the Sort dropdown.
• Row 2: a small pill for each kind of artist you have, with its icon before the word (Member, Guest), and on the right the By medium / A–Z switch. Click a pill to show only that kind of artist; click it again to show everyone. The pills double as the key to the icons, so the Artists page has no separate legend line (the artist page, Featuring list and homepage keep theirs).

On a phone the search takes the full width, then Mediums and Sort sit side by side, then the pills, then the By medium / A–Z switch. The search and the medium filter work in both views.

If you have set up an artist duo (two members shown as one), the Artists page also shows an Artist duos section above the lists, one card per duo. See Showing two artists as a duo in the artist roster guide. The search box narrows duos too: a duo stays when its name or either artist’s name matches, and the Artist duos section disappears when none do. The medium and badge filters apply to the artist lists only, not to duos.

The Sort control on the Artists page orders every list by Last name (the default, A to Z) or First name. Last name uses the last name on the artist’s record, or the last word of their name when none is set, and artists who share a last name fall back to first name. Choosing First name is kept in the page address (?sort=first), so a reload or a shared link opens in the same order; with nothing in the address the page is in last-name order. In the By medium view each medium group is in the same order. Hidden and archived artists stay off the page either way.

You choose which view the page opens in. Under Studio Site → Theme pick Artists page opens in: grouped by medium (the default) or the A to Z list. Visitors can always switch between the two on the page itself.

Phone, email and social links

Set them on the Footer card — they show in the header of every page and again in the footer once the footer is published. Social links must be https addresses; a 10-digit US phone number displays as (xxx) xxx-xxxx.

Your homepage

Under your featured artists and works, the front page ends with Latest works — the three most recently added works in your catalog, newest first. It is a taste, not a catalog: View all works goes to the full, searchable list.

The Homepage card (Studio Site (left menu) → Pages) writes the strip that renders above your featured artist and artworks on the front page: headline, subheadline, welcome text, an announcement (your next reception), and up to two buttons (link to a page on your site like /artists, or any https address). Every field is optional — leave one empty and it simply doesn’t appear. Publish the Homepage card to show it; the artwork catalog renders regardless.

Give the announcement an end. Under the announcement is Show the announcement until, an optional date and time. After that moment the announcement stops appearing on your homepage, and the words are kept so you can edit them for the next reception rather than typing it all again. Leave it empty and the announcement behaves as it always has: it stays up until you clear it.

It goes by your gallery’s clock, not the visitor’s, so a reception that ends at 7pm disappears at 7pm where you are — not at lunchtime for somebody reading from another state.

The date you type inside the announcement is just words. CartonCrew never reads it, because guessing a date out of a sentence would take your banner down early over a typo. Only the Show until field decides.

There is no hours field here. Your hours live in one place — Studio Site → Hours — and are shown on the Visit page, the What’s On calendar and in your footer from that one entry.

”Our artists” — how those four faces are chosen

The Our artists strip on the home page shows four artists, and which four is not arbitrary. It is worth knowing the rules, because one of them is a lever you can pull.

It is the rest of the gallery, not the featured few. Anyone you have chosen in Studio Site → Featured is deliberately left out of this strip. They already have the spotlight block higher up the page, with their biography, and showing the same four faces twice on one screen says the same thing twice. The two blocks answer different questions: the featured block answers who is showing now, and this strip answers who are your artists.

Beyond that, an artist appears here only if all of these are true:

• They are one of your own artists. Guest and show artists are excluded — they are visiting for one exhibition, and “Our artists” is a claim about who the gallery represents, not who happens to be hanging this month.
• They have a photograph. The strip is faces. A row of initials is a worse home page than no row at all, so an artist with no portrait never appears here however long they have been a member.
• They are not archived, and not hidden from the public site.
• They have not left. An artist carrying an end date is a former member, and a former member is not one of “our artists” — the same rule the featured artist block applies. Clear the end date and they return to the strip on their own; nothing else needs doing.

The order is most recently edited first — and that is the answer to “why these four”. Every time you edit an artist’s record, they move toward the front of the queue. It is the only lever you have over this strip today: if you want someone shown, open their record and save a change to it.

The home page shows four, picked from the 24 most recently edited eligible artists and spread across mediums where it can — a painter, a ceramicist and a jeweller reads as a community in a way four painters does not. Everyone else is behind View all artists.

What that means in practice, stated plainly rather than dressed up:

• An artist whose record is never edited sinks down the queue and may never appear on the home page. There is no rotation and no fairness pass today.
• Photographs are the other half of it, and the gap is usually bigger than a gallery expects: in a live gallery of 45 eligible artists, 37 had a portrait — so eight of them could not be shown here at all until one was added. Adding the missing portraits is a gallery action, not something the software can do for you. Artists → Artists shows you who is missing one.

Banner image

Add a Banner image to the Homepage card and your headline, subheadline and buttons move onto it: a full-width photograph across the top of your front page, with the words over the bottom of it.

• Upload a wide picture — the gallery itself, a show being hung, a wall of work. It is cropped to a broad band, so a tall or square image loses its top and bottom, and anything under about 1600 pixels wide will look soft stretched across a large screen.
• Your headline and buttons are drawn once: on the banner when you have one, above the page when you don’t. They never appear twice.
• Your welcome text and announcement stay where they are, below the banner.
• No banner, no change: the front page is exactly as it was.

News and works subheadings

One line under the Latest news and Latest works headings — “exhibitions, events and new arrivals”, “fresh to the gallery”. Both live on the Homepage card, and both are optional.

Stats strip

The homepage card can show a band of numbers: switch on your live artist count and available-works count (always computed fresh when the page loads), and add up to four of your own label/value pairs, like 32 / Years in business. Configure nothing and no strip appears.

The two live counts read Artists and Works available unless you say otherwise — there are wording boxes beside each switch, so you can call them “Artists represented” and “Original works” if that is how your gallery talks. The number stays ours to count; only the words are yours.

What the artists number counts. The same people as your Artists page: every current member artist, whether or not they have a piece for sale, plus each guest artist who has at least one piece showing on your Works page. Show artists are not counted, and neither are archived artists, artists hidden from the website or artists whose membership has ended. When nobody qualifies the number is left out of the strip.

What the works number counts. Every piece a visitor can buy on your website: the pieces on your Works page plus the pieces in any Show that is running now (they are for sale on the Show’s own page). It leaves out sold, reserved, on loan and Not for sale pieces, pieces in the recycle bin, Cards and Prints lines, pieces by an archived artist, an artist hidden from the website or an artist whose membership has ended, pieces with no photo yet, and a show artist’s pieces while their Show is not running. Your dashboard’s Total pieces available for sale uses the same rules, and when some of your pieces are not on the website it says how many and why, so the two numbers always add up.

Each number carries a small icon, matched to what it counts — artists, works, years, and so on. A pair we do not recognize gets a neutral mark rather than a wrong one, and the icons are decorative: a screen reader reads the number and its label, not the glyph.

How the strip looks. The strip is a slim band, so it does not push the rest of your homepage down. Every number is the same size, drawn large in your theme’s accent color, with its icon in a small tinted circle above it. On a computer the numbers sit side by side in equal columns, always on one row when there are up to three, with a thin line only between two numbers, never before the first or after the last. A long label, like “Member, Guest and Show Artists”, wraps onto two even lines under its number instead of widening the column. With four numbers they sit two per row on a narrow screen and four across on a wide one; with five or six, three per row. On a phone they stack, one per row, with no lines. A number that links somewhere (your artists, your works, your About page) lifts slightly when the pointer is over it. If your theme’s accent is too pale to read as a large number on the strip’s background, the numbers use your theme’s text color instead, so they always read clearly.

The count-up. The first time a visitor scrolls the strip into view, each plain number counts up from zero to its real value in about a second, once per visit to the page; scrolling away and back does not replay it. A value that is not a plain number, like “30+” or “lots”, is shown just as you typed it. A visitor whose device asks for reduced motion sees the final numbers with no animation, and search engines and screen readers always get the real number, never the zero it counts from.

Years. The years figure shows just the number, like “35”, when its label already says years (the default Years, or your own wording such as “Years in our town”). If you reword it without the word year, like “Since we opened”, the number keeps “years” beside it so it still reads as an age.

Calendar, and your exhibitions

Calendar is the one place a visitor looks to answer “what can I see, and when”. It has three views:

• Month — a calendar grid, with your closed days shaded. Click a day to see everything on it in the panel beside the month (below it on a phone).
• Exhibitions — your shows as picture cards.
• News — your news posts.

It was called What’s on until it grew past shows: it now carries exhibitions, events and classes, and the admin side calls the same underlying record a calendar entry. One name for one thing, for staff and visitors alike.

The web address did not change. It is still /whats-on, deliberately — that link is in every email the gallery has ever sent, and in the redirects from /news and /exhibitions. Breaking a bookmark to change a word on screen would be a poor trade.

Exhibitions used to be its own menu item, and so did News. Both are views here now, because the Calendar was already listing every one of those shows — the menu had two entries pointing at two pictures of the same thing. Nothing was removed: the picture cards are exactly as they were.

The view you’re looking at is in the address, so you can send someone a link straight to the month or to the exhibitions. Old links to /exhibitions and /news still work and land on the matching view, and every link to an individual show is untouched.

Exhibition pages and the catalog

On a show’s page, each work now carries the name of the artist who made it. The “Featuring” block above is your curator’s selection; it isn’t an attribution, so a piece by an artist you hadn’t featured used to appear with no name against it at all.

The works are laid out two to a row rather than one, so a ten-piece show is a page you can take in rather than a very long scroll.

The exhibition banner

Every time you save an exhibition — or add and remove works from it — a 1500 x 750 promotional banner is drawn for it automatically: one artwork per featured artist, the artist names, and the run dates over a teal wave. It is made for sharing, so it lives at a permanent public address.

• It prefers works that are in the show, so the banner shows what a visitor will actually find on the wall.
• A one-artist show uses two different pieces by that artist.
• If none of the works have images yet, no banner is made. A half-empty banner going out under your gallery’s name is worse than none, and the moment you add a picture and save, one appears.
• It never touches an image you uploaded yourself. Those are separate; your own choice is never overwritten.
• If it can’t be made for any reason, your exhibition still saves, and you won’t see an error. It is drawn after your changes are stored, never before.

Banner theme

The banner is drawn in the Standard look (a teal wave, dark-teal names, white dates) unless you ask for something else. Next to Generate banner on the show is a Banner theme select:

• Standard (the default) — the teal composition above.
• Custom… — a text box appears. Type what you want in a few words — fall, thanksgiving, black and white, spring florals — and click Generate banner. The banner is redrawn in a palette and (where it fits) a light decorative motif to match: warm oranges and leaves for fall, cool blues and snow for winter, and so on. Up to 60 characters.

What happens with your theme:

• It is remembered. The show keeps its theme, and every automatic redraw — after you edit the dates, change the featured artists, or add and remove works — uses the same palette without asking the AI again. Reopen the show and the select shows the theme it has.
• Standard clears it. Choose Standard and generate, and the next banner is the teal one; the custom theme is removed from the show.
• Your words are never drawn on the banner. The theme is turned into a set of colors and a motif name, and only those reach the picture. Typing anything odd can’t break the banner.
• When AI isn’t available for your gallery (turned off in Settings → Organization → AI, or the month’s allowance is spent), common themes — fall, winter, spring, summer, holidays, halloween, valentine, black and white — still work from a built-in palette, and anything else gets the standard look. The message after generating says which was used. Either way the banner is drawn and your save never fails because of the theme.

Generate catalog

The button on an exhibition (Exhibitions → open a show) used to say Checklist PDF. It says Generate catalog, because that is what it now produces:

• In the order you choose. Pressing Generate catalog asks first: Surname A–Z (already chosen) or First name A–Z group the pieces under each artist’s name, each named once; SKU, Wall order or Title print one list in that order. See the Exhibitions & Shows guide, The printed catalog.
• A price against each work, or Sold. A sold piece never shows what it went for.
• A small picture of each piece. A work with no image still gets its entry — the details are the point, the picture is the courtesy.
• A closing note: how long the show runs, your opening hours, and that works can be bought in the gallery or online.
• No CartonCrew line in the header. This is your printed matter.

Your hours in that note come from Studio Site → Hours, like everywhere else. If you haven’t set them, the catalog simply leaves that part out.

Moving a page into the footer

Every page card has Show this in the footer instead of the top menu. Tick it and that page’s link moves out of the header and into a row at the bottom of every page.

Use it for pages that matter but that a visitor isn’t hunting for — Join Us is the usual one, since it’s aimed at artists rather than people coming to look at art. A shorter top menu makes the things people are looking for easier to find.

This is not the same as unpublishing. The page stays live and its link works; only where the link sits changes. (Unpublishing removes the page altogether, so a footer link to an unpublished page would go nowhere.)

Your pages

The catalog is the site — but a gallery still needs to say who it is, where it is, and how to reach it. Studio Site (left menu) → Pages gives you these:

• About — heading, an optional hero image (an https link), and your text.
• Mission — your mission statement on its own page, at /mission. Same heading, image and text fields as About.
• Donations — why give, plus a button that links to your own payment processor (an https link to Square checkout, PayPal, etc.). Card details never touch your site. Shown at /donate.
• Sponsors — the businesses that support you: name, uploaded logo and their website (https). Renders as a logo grid at /sponsors, each logo linking out in a new tab; a sponsor without a logo shows as their name.
• Get Involved — volunteer and participation opportunities, each with an optional button to a page on your site (like /join) or an https link. Rename the page whatever you like - the menu label follows. Shown at /get-involved.
• Visit — address, opening hours, how to get here.
• Contact — text, email, phone.
• Privacy — your privacy policy, at /privacy. Unlike the others it starts from a generated template; see Privacy below.
• Terms — your Terms & Conditions, at /terms, including the SMS Terms your text message registration needs. Like Privacy it starts from a generated template; see Terms & Conditions below.
• Refunds is not on this list, and that is deliberate. Your returns policy page, at /refunds, is written from the policy the register enforces, so it is switched on in Settings → Returns → On your website, where the policy itself is set. Once published it is linked under Explore in the footer. See The register for the details.
• Footer — a short blurb, address, email, phone, your opening hours (taken from Studio Site → Hours, not typed here), and the copyright name (defaults to your organization name). Non-profits can also add a non-profit statement and their EIN (entered as 91-1234567); both render above the copyright line, only when filled in.

Each page has its own Save and a Published switch. Save keeps a private draft — nothing unpublished ever appears on the public site, and a page only gets a menu link once it is published. Unpublish a page and it leaves the menu with it. Text is shown exactly as you type it: blank lines make paragraphs; there is no HTML. The main text areas - and exhibition descriptions - also understand a little formatting - bold, italic, links  (https or a /page on your own site only), - bulleted and 1. numbered lists, and ## subheadings - with a toolbar above the box to insert them. Anything that looks like HTML is removed when you save.

You need the Website Manager capability, the same as the rest of this tab.

What a new gallery starts with

Your site is not handed over empty. When your gallery is set up, every page in the list above except Privacy and Terms already exists, with a heading and some starter text, and none of them is published. The structure is the same for every gallery on the plan, so there is no reason to make you invent it; the words are yours, and the starter text says so.

The starter text is not copy you can ship. Every sentence of it is written as an instruction in square brackets:

[REPLACE THIS: two or three short paragraphs welcoming a visitor. Say who runs the gallery, what kind of work is on the walls, and why someone should come in. Delete every word of this and write your own]

Only the headings and button labels are real — About us, Visit us, Donate. Everything a visitor would read as a sentence is a bracketed instruction waiting to be replaced.

A page still carrying its starter text cannot be published. Tick Published on one and the save is refused, naming the page. This is not a warning you can click past: it is the server refusing, so nothing you do in the browser gets round it. Save a real change to the page — anything at all — and the page becomes yours; the Starter text badge disappears from its heading and it publishes normally. A page you open and save without changing anything is still starter text, and still will not publish.

Two things this deliberately does not do:

• It never touches a page you have already written. If your site already has pages, they are left exactly as they are — including a page you emptied on purpose. Nothing is overwritten, ever.
• It never publishes anything. Putting a page in front of the public is always your decision.

The order to write them in. The list on the Pages tab is the recommended order, and it is the order to work down:

Email addresses, phone numbers, links and images are never filled in for you — there is no honest placeholder for an email address, and a made-up link is just a broken one. Contact and Donations in particular need something from you beyond the words.

Privacy is not among them, on purpose. Your gallery — not CartonCrew — is responsible for what your privacy policy says, so we do not create one you never asked for. It starts from a generated template when you ask for it; see Privacy below. Terms is not among them either, for the same reason: they are your gallery’s terms, and they start from a template only when you ask for one.

If your site is older than this and never got the starter pages, ask CartonCrew to run the setup for your gallery. It only adds pages you do not have, so nothing you have written is at risk.

Putting several pages live at once

Once you have written them, you do not have to publish the pages one at a time. Publishing several together either works for all of them or does nothing at all — if any page in the batch still has its starter text, the whole batch is refused and the answer names the page to fix. A partial publish that quietly left two pages behind is how a site goes live with a hole in it.

Privacy and Terms are never part of a batch: publishing either one stamps its effective date, so each goes live from its own page, on its own.

Visual editor. If CartonCrew has switched the visual editor on for your organization (the same rollout switch as Website by Puck), About, Visit and Contact each get an Open visual editor button. Your current text is turned into blocks to start from; Save keeps the blocks. On Contact, the blocks include a Contact form block that holds your message form; a Contact page without one still shows the form after its blocks, and Visit keeps its Get in touch section. Use classic editor returns you to the form with your original text intact. The footer always uses the form.

Privacy

Your site collects personal details — inquiries, class bookings, the newsletter list, people you record as patrons — so it needs a privacy policy. Studio Site → Pages → Privacy is where it lives. It appears at /privacy and is linked from the Explore column in the footer of every page, including the home page, once you publish it. Until then there is no link and no page: an unpublished policy linked from every page would be a dead end at the bottom of your whole site.

You are the one making this statement, not us. Your gallery is the data controller for the people in its records. CartonCrew has its own privacy policy covering the platform; it does not cover what you do with your patrons’ details, and it cannot, because we do not know what else you do with them away from this website.

Starting from the template

Open the Privacy card and press Insert the template. It fills the form with a draft policy headed Privacy Policy (a heading you have already saved is yours and is never changed for you; inserting the template replaces it in the form only, before you save), listing every category of personal data this platform stores for a gallery — patrons and their consents, inquiries, the newsletter, sales, class sign-ups and waiting lists, volunteers, membership applications, your artists, donations, text alerts, See it on your wall (augmented reality), what the site records about a visit, questions asked of Parker, the copies AI features make, your audit log, and the Square and QuickBooks connections — each with why it is held, how long, and how somebody gets rid of it.

The template is generated from the database, not written by hand. That is the point of it: a policy typed out once is true for a week and then quietly stops being, because nothing about adding a table reaches into a paragraph. Here, a new table that holds personal data fails a check in our build until the template names it, so what you insert next year describes next year’s product.

What you still have to do

Read it. It is a starting point, it says so on the page itself, and it is not legal advice — nobody has reviewed it for your jurisdiction or your gallery.

Look for the phrase “Your gallery must”. Every one of those is a decision we cannot make for you, usually a retention period: how long you keep an inquiry, a waiting-list entry, a declined membership application. We do not invent numbers, because a policy that promises a deletion nothing performs is worse than one that admits the gallery has not decided. The only period the template states is the ninety days after which the site’s own visitor analytics are deleted, which the platform genuinely enforces.

Then fill in the email address and postal address for privacy requests, delete anything that does not apply to you, and add anything you do off the website that we would not know about — a paper visitors’ book, a mailing list you keep in a spreadsheet, CCTV in the gallery.

Save keeps it as a private draft, exactly like every other page. Publishing is a separate switch. Do not publish it until you have read it and taken your own advice.

The effective date

The date shown at the top of the published page is set automatically the day you publish, and again every time you publish a change. You cannot type it, on purpose: a date somebody has to remember to change is a date that will be wrong. Saving a draft does not move it — what the public sees is dated the day it became what the public sees.

The Copyright & DMCA link

The bottom line of every page’s footer, after your copyright line, carries Copyright & DMCA. It opens CartonCrew’s own Copyright & DMCA page at cartoncrew.online/copyright, in the same tab. That page names the agent who receives copyright complaints for every gallery website CartonCrew hosts, says what a complaint and a reply to one must contain, and states that the accounts of people who repeatedly infringe are closed in appropriate circumstances. You do not set it up and cannot turn it off: it is the platform’s notice, not yours. If someone tells you a piece on your site uses their work without permission, point them to that page.

The See it on your wall (augmented reality) section

Some artwork pages offer See it on your wall. The template’s See it on your wall (augmented reality) section says how it works: on iPhone and iPad it opens Apple’s AR Quick Look, and on Android Google’s Scene Viewer; the camera is used only by the visitor’s device and that app, and CartonCrew receives no camera images, video or room measurements. To show the artwork, the app downloads the artwork’s public 3D model from us, and on Android the model’s web address and the artwork’s title are passed to Google. Apple’s and Google’s own privacy terms apply to their apps. The section is the owner-approved wording, the same paragraph as in CartonCrew’s own privacy policy.

It is in the template for new pages only. A policy you already saved or published does not change by itself: it is your statement, so the edit is yours to make.

The “doesn’t yet describe See it on your wall” notice

If you saved your Privacy page before the section existed, your Dashboard tells you so, once: Your Privacy page doesn’t yet describe See it on your wall. Only people who can edit the website see it (Owners, Admins, and anyone given the website permission), and nothing is emailed or texted to anyone.

1. In the sidebar, choose Dashboard. The notice is at the top of the page.
2. Choose one of its two buttons:
   • Add the section puts the standard wording, the template’s See it on your wall (augmented reality) section, into your saved Privacy page, just before Your choices (or at the end if your page has no such heading). Nothing else in your policy changes. If the page is published, the section is public straight away and the effective date at the top moves to today; if it is not published, it stays unpublished. The notice then disappears, and a green line says where to find the section.
   • Dismiss hides the notice for your gallery for good, without changing your policy. It does not come back, even if you edit the Privacy page later.
3. To read or change the section after adding it: in the sidebar, choose Studio Site, choose the Pages tab, and click the Privacy card. The section is in the Policy box under ## See it on your wall (augmented reality). Edit it like any other text, then press Save at the foot of the card (it is labelled Save Privacy).

The notice looks for the section’s heading, not its wording, so you can reword the paragraph freely. Keep a heading that starts with See it on your wall (for example ## See it on your wall) and the notice stays away. A gallery that never saved a Privacy page never sees the notice: Insert the template already includes the section.

If you would rather bring the section across by hand, press Replace with the template in the Privacy card and copy the section across, as for the Text alerts section below.

Adding the Text alerts (SMS) section to a policy you already published

If your gallery uses Text Alerts, your privacy policy needs a Text alerts (SMS) section. The carriers that deliver texts review the policy your text messaging registration links to, and they require it to say, word for word: We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes. Reviewers also reject a policy whose other sharing (with an AI provider, an e-signature provider, Square or QuickBooks) could be read as including text-message data. So the template’s Text alerts (SMS) section, under Who else sees it, carries that sentence and two more: Mobile numbers, phone numbers, SMS opt-in data, and contact information will not be shared with or sold to third parties for commercial or marketing purposes., and that the policy’s other sharing excludes text-messaging opt-in data and consent. Twilio, which delivers the texts, is the only one named as receiving them.

A policy you published before then does not have this wording, and nothing changes a published policy for you: it is your statement, so the edit is yours to make. If your text messaging registration (the Campaign) was rejected because of the privacy policy, this is the fix: bring in the current Text alerts (SMS) section by one of the two routes below, even if your policy already has an older version of that section (replace the old one rather than keeping both), publish, and then resubmit the Campaign.

If you have hardly changed the template, start again from it:

1. In the sidebar, choose Studio Site.
2. Choose the Pages tab.
3. Click the Privacy card to open it.
4. Press Replace with the template. The Policy box now holds the current template, including the Text alerts (SMS) section. Nothing is saved yet.
5. Make your changes again: the email and postal address for privacy requests, anything that does not apply to you, and every line marked “Your gallery must”.
6. The template also resets the Heading box to Privacy. Change it to Privacy Policy: the registration checks that title.
7. Leave Published ticked and press Save at the foot of the card (it is labelled Save Privacy).

If you have rewritten a lot of it, copy just the new section across:

1. In the sidebar, choose Studio Site, then the Pages tab, then click the Privacy card.
2. Press Replace with the template.
3. In the Policy box, select from the line ## Text alerts (SMS) down to the line before the next heading that starts with ##, and copy it.
4. Choose another tab, such as Theme. When asked “You have unsaved changes on this section. Leave without saving?”, press OK. Your saved policy is untouched.
5. Choose the Pages tab again and click the Privacy card. Your own policy is back in the Policy box.
6. If your policy already has a ## Text alerts (SMS) section, select it (down to the line before the next ## heading) and paste over it. Otherwise paste the section where it fits, for example just before ## Your choices.
7. If the Heading box does not already say Privacy Policy, change it to that: the registration checks the title.
8. Leave Published ticked and press Save at the foot of the card (it is labelled Save Privacy).

Either way the change is public as soon as you save, and the effective date at the top of the page moves to today. The registration also checks that the page names your gallery; the template’s opening lines already do. Check the result at /privacy on your site.

Terms & Conditions

If your gallery uses Text Alerts, the carriers that review your text message registration look for a Terms & Conditions page on your own website with an SMS Terms section that names your gallery. Studio Site → Pages → Terms is where it lives. It appears at /terms with the heading Terms & Conditions, and is linked from the Explore column in the footer of every page once you publish it. Like Privacy it is never in the top menu, and until it is published there is no link and no page.

Once published, the browser tab and link previews read Terms & Conditions – followed by your gallery’s name, and a published Privacy page reads Privacy Policy – and your name. Each has its own short description rather than your home page’s, and the page’s heading and text are in the page as it first arrives, so a reviewer’s checker that does not run scripts still sees them.

Adding and publishing your terms

1. In the left menu, open Studio Site, then the Pages tab.
2. Open the Terms card and press Insert the template. The form fills with a draft headed Terms & Conditions. Nothing is saved yet.
3. Read the SMS Terms section. It names your gallery and says, in the words the carriers look for: what the program is and the three kinds of message (sales activity as a daily summary, schedule and shift updates, and time-sensitive alerts such as an emergency closure); that no marketing texts are sent; that members join only through the sign-up form in the member portal and that consent is not a condition of purchase or employment; Message frequency varies; Message and data rates may apply; reply STOP to cancel and HELP for help, with your Contact page as the contact; that carriers are not liable for delayed or undelivered messages; and a link to your Privacy Policy with the sentence We do not sell or share your SMS opt-in data or personal information with third parties for marketing purposes.
4. Make the name match your registration exactly. The template uses your gallery’s name. If your text message registration uses a legal name, such as one ending in Inc. or a doing business as name, change every mention in the text to that name.
5. Optionally fill in Contact email. It is shown at the bottom of the page.
6. Press Save. That keeps a private draft.
7. When you have read it, tick Published and press Save again. The Effective date is filled in for you, the same way as Privacy’s. If the page is still empty or still has template text in it, a warning appears first; see Before a Terms or Privacy page goes live.

The template is a starting point and says so on the page: it is not legal advice. Keep the SMS Terms section, but change anything else that does not fit your gallery, and delete the This is a starting point, not legal advice. paragraph once you have. Publish your Privacy policy too, because the SMS Terms link to it.

Before a Terms or Privacy page goes live

When you tick Published on the Terms or Privacy card and press Save, the card first checks the text you are about to publish. If any of these is true, a yellow warning appears inside the card, above the Save button, and nothing is saved yet:

• The page is empty: there is nothing but the heading and the effective date (for example, Save was pressed before Insert the template).
• The template’s starting-point paragraph is still there: the paragraph that begins This is a starting point, not legal advice. The warning names it. Read the page, change what is wrong, then delete that paragraph.
• Template placeholders are still there: anything in square brackets waiting to be filled in, and, on Privacy, each Your gallery must… line. The warning lists them.

The warning has two buttons:

• Keep editing closes the warning and saves nothing. Fix the text, then press Save again.
• Publish anyway saves and publishes the page exactly as it is. The check is advice only.

A page like this would likely fail a carrier’s review of your gallery’s text message registration, which is why the card asks. Saving with Published unticked (a private draft) never shows the warning, and neither does a page with none of these left in it. The check reads only the page you are editing.

What changes on the member sign-up form

The member Text Alerts sign-up form links to Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. Each link goes to your own website’s page once that page is published: /terms once Terms is published, /privacy once Privacy is published. Until then, that link goes to CartonCrew’s own page at cartoncrew.online instead. Each link is decided on its own, so publishing only Privacy changes only the Privacy link.

Things that surprise people

Featuring a piece that then sells is fine. It simply stops appearing. You don’t have to remember to un-feature it, and nothing breaks.

A gallery without the module enabled isn’t “coming soon” — it’s invisible. Requests to the public routes return “not found” rather than an error saying the site exists but is switched off.

Square and your website are the same shop now. If you connect Square, the site sells from the same catalog your POS sells from — stock of 1 per original, so a piece sold at the counter stops being available online and vice versa. Leave Square unconnected and the site stays a shop window: inquiries only, sales recorded by you in the dashboard, exactly as before.

Parker, the site’s AI assistant

Switched on, Parker answers visitor questions — who shows with you, what is available in a medium, what a piece is — grounded in your public catalog and nothing else. When an answer is about particular works, Parker shows them as cards the visitor can click straight through to, so a question ends on the artwork rather than in a paragraph about it. Sold works stay out of those cards unless you show sold work on your site.

Parker only ever cites what the public can already see: an archived artist, an unpublished page or a reserved work is as invisible to Parker as it is to a visitor.

Parker knows your whole roster. Every artist who is not archived is known to Parker by name, however large your catalog is, and asking about one by name brings that artist’s own work into the answer. Until v1.361 Parker could only see your forty most recently added works, which on a full catalog meant it knew a handful of artists well and the rest not at all — and could end up showing one artist’s work under another artist’s name. If a piece is genuinely not in what Parker can see, it now says so rather than offering something else instead.

Parker knows your classes, and whether they still have places. A published class with a session still to come is known to Parker — its dates, price, teacher, place and summary — together with how many places are left and how to book: open the class on your site’s Classes page and use the booking form. The number is the same one the class page shows, so the two never disagree. A class that is full is described as full, and Parker points the visitor at the waitlist on the class page rather than going quiet. A class you have stopped taking bookings for is described that way, and a members-only class is described as bookable by signed-in members. Parker never knows who has booked or who is waiting — only how many places are left. Draft classes, classes that have already run, and every class if the Classes module is off, are invisible to Parker.

It is a conversation, not a series of questions. Parker remembers what has been said in the open chat, so a visitor can ask “do you have anything by Rowan?” and follow with “what sizes does she work at?” and be understood. The conversation lives in the panel and nowhere else: it is never stored, so closing the chat ends it, and nothing about a visitor’s questions is kept beyond the answer log below.

Answers are formatted for reading. Parker puts artist names in bold and work titles in italics, so a reply that introduces three artists can be skimmed rather than read end to end. Until v1.367.1 the chat showed those markers as raw asterisks (**Aziza Saliev**), which was noise in front of every name it mentioned.

The “are you a human” check happens once. Visitors are asked to pass a Cloudflare check before their first question, and not again for the rest of the conversation. Until v1.360 the check reappeared before every message, which made Parker close to unusable; if a visitor leaves the chat open for a long time they may be asked once more, which is the check quietly expiring rather than anything being wrong.

Who is in the gallery today

The best reason to visit you is that the person who made the work is standing in the room. Your site did not say so anywhere.

Under Studio Site → Who is in the gallery today, tick the box and your homepage carries the member artists rostered on gallery duty today — one line each: their photo, their name, and the hours they are in. It reads “Come and say hello” and makes the point once that the person a visitor meets is one of the people who made the work.

One line per person, even on back-to-back shifts. A member who works two shifts in a row (for example 11am to 2:30pm, then 2:30pm to 6pm) appears once, from 11am to 6pm. If there is a gap between their shifts, each stretch gets its own line, because they are not in the gallery in between.

The heading names the day, for example “In the gallery today · Saturday, September 26” — your gallery’s own today, in your gallery’s own timezone, so a visitor who left the page open overnight is never shown yesterday’s roster looking like today’s.

A roster, not a set of profiles. No biography appears here. The section answers one question — who is here, and when — and the story belongs on the artist’s own page. Each row is a single link straight to it, so a visitor who wants the story is one click away and a visitor who wants the hours is not reading past three lines of prose to find them.

The hours are as prominent as the name, because they are what somebody deciding whether to come now is actually looking for.

Times read the way a visitor reads them — 11am – 11pm, not 11:00-23:00. An artist with no end time on their shift reads from 11am, and a shift with no usable time shows no time at all rather than half a range.

Artists are listed one per row, which is how a list of times is read. A busy Saturday makes the list longer, not wider, and it never pushes the rest of your homepage off the screen.

It is off until you turn it on. If your roster is thin, or you would rather not publish who is alone in the building on a Tuesday afternoon, that stays your call.

Set your gallery’s timezone in the same place. This is not optional dressing: “today” cannot be worked out without it. Working it out in UTC would mean a gallery open until six spends its last hour every day advertising tomorrow’s artist to the people standing in front of it. So we ask you rather than guess — and until you set it, the section does not appear, even with the box ticked. The page says as much while it is unset.

What it will and will not show:

• Only artists the public can already see. An archived artist, one hidden from the directory, and a former member never appear — the same rule as everywhere else on your public site.
• Only gallery duty. A community volunteer event’s sign-ups can be members of the public, and their names are yours to hold rather than everyone’s to read.
• No contact details, ever. No email, no phone number. A visitor is being invited to the building, not handed somebody’s details.
• Nothing at all on a day nobody is rostered. The section is absent rather than inviting somebody to come and meet nobody.

Teaching the assistant: what it knows, and what it could not answer

Parker’s answers are grounded in your catalog — artists, works, exhibitions, pages, events — so any question outside those produced a deflection. It was not refusing to learn; it had nowhere to put a fact.

Under Studio Site → Assistant you write topic-and-answer entries in your own words, and Parker uses them as written. Write “we don’t run classes, but we host artist talks — ask at the desk” once and Parker says it that way to every visitor. Entries start as drafts, so an unfinished answer never reaches anybody, and you can read back the complete list of what Parker has been told — when it says something wrong, you can find the sentence that caused it and change it.

Beneath that list is the questions it could not answer. Whenever Parker has to tell a visitor it does not have something, the question is added here, and repeats of the same question are grouped with a count — most-asked first, because “asked 12 times” is what tells you which gap is worth an afternoon rather than which one you happen to find interesting.

• Answer this opens a topic and answer for that question, prefilled with the visitor’s own wording. Saving creates an entry like any other, as a draft; the question then leaves the list.
• Ignore sets a question aside. Anybody can type into the chat, so spam and odd one-offs arrive here by construction. An ignored question stays gone even if it is asked again — you should not have to dismiss the same thing twice — but its count keeps rising, and Show ignored brings it back into view if it turns out to have mattered.

Nothing about the visitor is stored — no session, no IP address, no fingerprint. Only the question, and how often it has been asked. And the list never gets in the way: if recording fails, the visitor still gets their answer.

Tidying up an answer

Write your answer in whatever form comes out — a note to yourself is fine — then press Tidy up. It comes back in complete sentences, in the gallery’s voice, and lands in the box for you to read, edit or reject. Undo puts your own version back.

Three things it deliberately will not do:

• It adds nothing. The reason to write these answers by hand is that you can read exactly what your assistant will say. A tidy-up that invented an opening time would take that away, and you would have no way to tell which sentence was yours. It rewrites what is there and nothing else — and if you said no, the answer still says no.
• It never publishes. Nothing reaches a visitor because you tidied it. The entry’s draft or published state is untouched.
• It will not write the answer for you. The button stays disabled until you have written something. Asked to answer a question from nothing, it would invent one, which is the failure worth avoiding entirely.

If it fails or comes back empty, your answer is left exactly as you typed it.

The AI assistant’s answer log

If you’ve turned the site’s AI assistant on, every answer it gives a visitor is recorded: which model answered, which version of its instructions was in force, the visitor’s question, what public information it was grounded on, the answer itself, and what it cost in tokens. So when someone asks “why did your chatbot say that?”, you can look it up rather than guess: the log holds the recent records for your gallery, and only gallery staff can read it.

Three things worth knowing:

• Nothing about the visitor is kept except the question they typed. No IP address, no browser fingerprint, no identity of any kind.
• The log never gets in the way. If recording fails for any reason, the visitor still gets their answer; the failure is logged on our side.
• It doesn’t grow forever. Only the most recent records are kept per gallery.

What the site records about visitors

Your site keeps its own traffic numbers, first-party — no third-party analytics script, no cookie banner, nothing to consent to. Each event is a type (a page view, a medium clicked, an artist viewed, a search), an optional short value, the visitor’s country as the edge already knows it, and two words describing how they arrived: desktop, mobile, tablet or unknown, and a browser family such as chrome or safari.

The raw User-Agent is not kept. That header names the browser version and the device model and is a fingerprint; the server reads it once, at the moment the event is written, records the two words above, and discards it. Those two columns will only accept values from that fixed list, so the string cannot be stored even by accident. There is no column for an IP address, a session or any visitor identity, and known crawlers are excluded from the counts.

Events are deleted after 90 days. All of this is described for your visitors in the generated Privacy template, so you do not have to write it out.

You read these numbers on Dashboard → Website, last 30 days — see Gallery dashboard, which also explains why the split starts out mostly Unknown.

Related

• Gallery dashboard — where this site’s traffic, devices and browsers are read.
• Website by Puck — the general nonprofit site. Galleries get this module instead.
• Artwork catalog and Exhibitions — the data this site renders.