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Ancestral Collections — Tribal Art & Antiques Gallery
A gallery website for tribal art, antiques and cultural objects, with a searchable catalogue, artwork pages, regional collections and editorial stories.
Why it matters
What makes it stand out.
A catalogue you can actually search
Search, six combinable filters, a price range, sorting and pagination run on the real dataset, and every combination is kept in the URL so a filtered view can be shared.
One page per object, built for search engines
Each artwork, region and story is a prerendered page with its own title, description, canonical URL, breadcrumbs and structured data, plus a sitemap generated from the content.
Honest by design
Unknown culture, period or provenance is shown as "Not documented" instead of being guessed, and the forms only report success after the server confirms the email was sent.
The problem
Gallery websites tend to be either a beautiful brochure with no real catalogue, or a generic online shop that strips objects of their context, condition and documentation.
Who it is for
Galleries and dealers who need collectors to browse a catalogue, trust the records and start a conversation about a specific object.
Key features
Editorial homepage
Hero, featured objects, browse by region, stories, curator's selection, gallery introduction, collector inquiry and newsletter.
Collection catalogue
Search across title, description, region, material and catalogue number, filters for region, culture, category, material, period, availability and price, with sorting and pagination.
Artwork detail pages
Image viewer with thumbnails, a full-screen lightbox with keyboard navigation and zoom, a record table, condition report, provenance and related objects.
Inquiry workflow
An accessible inquiry dialog with validation, consent and spam protection, delivered by email through the site's own API.
Regions and stories
Regional landing pages with sub-regions, image galleries, object types and related stories; editorial articles linked to the objects they discuss.
Content in one place
Settings, regions, categories, artworks and stories live in one typed data file, so new objects are added without touching any component.
The same approach can be adapted for
- Tribal art, antique and ethnographic galleries
- Art dealers and collectors who sell through inquiries rather than a checkout
- Museums and cultural foundations publishing a collection online
Design concept
Warm ivory and antique paper as the canvas, deep charcoal type, and bronze used sparingly for accents. Headings use Cormorant Garamond and body text uses Instrument Sans. The layouts lean editorial: an asymmetric hero, a staggered featured grid and magazine-style story compositions.
What can be verified
- 34 prerendered pages from one data file, with a redirect from a renamed artwork URL.
- No horizontal overflow at 320 px and 375 px; filters, lightbox and forms tested in the browser.
- Search, filters and sorting tested against the dataset, with every state stored in the URL.
