Susan Street Fine Art has been on Cedros Avenue in Solana Beach for decades. The gallery sells relationships and provenance — inquiry-driven, not e-commerce. Collectors browse, inquire, and visit.
The website wasn’t really telling that story yet.
When I reviewed it against our design knowledge base — information architecture, static-site patterns, UI principles — a clear pattern emerged: the site was showing imagery, but not doing much of the work that turns a visitor into an inquiry or a gallery visit.
I built a proof-of-concept redesign at ssfa-redesign-poc.pages.dev to show what a more intentional gallery experience could look like on the same business model, with measured performance improvements alongside it.
What’s on susanstreet.com today
- Header: logo plus four links — Artists, Portfolio, Consulting, Contact. No phone, no “Inquire,” no location in the nav.
- Body: a single auto-rotating image banner — six slides, no headline, no value proposition, no current exhibition, no text in the main content area.
- Footer: address, phone, email, and two marketplace links.
A first-time visitor would have a hard time learning what the gallery stands for, who it represents, or what to do next. The tasks collectors usually care about — seeing the current show, browsing an artist, inquiring about a work, planning a visit — aren’t easy to reach from the header.
Regen Projects runs the same legacy Artlogic “exhibit-E” engine and looks world-class. So platform alone doesn’t seem to be the ceiling here. Content and design look like the bigger levers.
My headline recommendation: upgrade to modern Artlogic Website (Susan Street is already on Artlogic’s stack) and rebuild around an exhibition-led, inquiry-driven model — “Now on View” first, artwork detail pages with Inquire CTAs, a proper Consulting offer, and a confident Solana Beach identity.
Squarespace or Shopify would probably be the wrong fit. This isn’t a checkout business.
What good looks like — and who to learn from
Blue-chip galleries (Gagosian, David Zwirner, Pace): exhibition-led homepages, editorial depth, location as part of the story, inquiry rather than checkout, and a kind of visual restraint that lets the work lead.
Local competitors: Madison Gallery in Solana Beach (same town) runs an exhibition reel homepage — current, upcoming, past, each dated — plus explicit collector services and a clear regional voice. Quint Gallery in La Jolla shows that a small program can feel serious with very little chrome.
Not the model: Saatchi Art’s commerce-first approach — priced grids, checkout, impulse buying. Susan Street sells relationships. There’s room to borrow browse and trust cues without importing the cart.
Why the images feel slow (with numbers)
I looked at the live markup, headers, and actual downloads. A few things were compounding:
| Finding | Impact |
|---|---|
| ~150 separate image requests on one project page | Browsers queue connections; images trickle in |
| A 236px thumbnail weighing 194 KB | Could be more like 15–30 KB |
| No modern format — CDN returns JPEG even when the browser asks for AVIF/WebP | Legacy URLs omit f_auto/q_auto flags |
No effective lazy-loading — thumbnails carry direct src | All 150 start downloading on page load |
| CloudFront cache misses on first visit | The origin generates many derivatives on demand |
One project page came to about 28 MB. It’s understandable why it can feel slow.
The encouraging part: the same CDN can serve optimized WebP once you add f_auto,q_auto to the URL. Combined with lazy-loading and fewer images per view, the improvement can be significant without leaving Artlogic.
The POC: same art, about 13× lighter
I pulled Susan Street’s actual project and artwork images, converted them to right-sized WebP, and built three demo pages — Home, Artists, Projects.
The entire image set for all three pages came to about 1.0 MB total, compared with ~28 MB for a single current project page. Same art. Lazy-loaded. Native loading="lazy". Exhibition-first information architecture with Inquire CTAs, a consulting offer, and Solana Beach identity.
Live preview: ssfa-redesign-poc.pages.dev
The POC isn’t really a platform migration pitch. It’s a way to show that content and design carry most of the weight — the information architecture rebuild and image discipline matter more than ripping out Artlogic.
Design choices in the POC
- “Now on View” above the fold — so the site feels current, not static
- One primary CTA per view — Inquire, rather than several competing actions
- Artwork detail pages — medium, dimensions, advisor path; no prices (inquiry model)
- Consulting as a first-class offer — in-home curatorial services, collection development, on-site consultation
- Accessibility baseline — meaningful alt text on hero and artwork images (the live site currently ships empty
alt=''on carousel slides) - Mobile tasks, not just a mobile slideshow — something to do on a phone, not only pinch-zoom a banner
What I’d do differently
I’d measure Core Web Vitals on the live site before writing recommendations — the image audit made a strong case, but LCP numbers comparing the POC to production would help in a client conversation.
I’d also map the Artlogic migration path more explicitly: exhibit-E → modern Artlogic Website is a vendor conversation, not a weekend rebuild. The POC validates direction; migration would be its own project with a content checklist.
Inquiry-driven sites share some DNA with nonprofit builds — clear CTAs, trust before conversion, integrations behind the scenes. See Research Before Pixels for the nonprofit side of that pattern.