Alma Čače
Alma Čače is a contemporary artist from Komiža, currently based in Split. Her abstract paintings and collages grow out of the Adriatic coast and the cliffs of island Vis, and she often paints with tools she finds in nature: sticks, dry leaves and plants. She exhibits regularly in galleries and public spaces across Croatia and runs art workshops.
A portfolio that kept people waiting
Her previous website was a WordPress theme stacked with two page builders, two slider plugins and an online store plugin, all running on slow shared hosting. Every page had to load the code of every plugin before it could show a single painting. Visitors waited, and an artist's site gets only a few seconds to make an impression before people move on.
Heavy plugins also made the site hard to look after. Small changes meant fighting page builders, and the paintings, the reason anyone visits, were squeezed into layouts designed for something else.
The new site was part of Progressing, Alma's 2024 project supported by the Croatian Ministry of Culture and Media to document and share her artistic process, which included an updated web platform. The goal was a site that loads quickly and feels like her practice: bold, coastal and intuitive, with nothing standing between a visitor and the work.
The art comes first
Every design decision starts from the paintings. The homepage opens on one of her own canvases, full screen. Typography and colour stay quiet so the work carries the volume, and each section has its own rhythm instead of the same card grid repeated down the page.
- Collections open into a full-screen lightbox you can browse with the mouse or the keyboard.
- Images load as the visitor scrolls, so even large collections open quickly.
- Text meets WCAG AA contrast, and every work has a description for screen readers.
The whole portfolio, carried over
Nothing was lost in the move. We imported the complete portfolio from the old site, more than 120 works across four collections: Metabolism, Connecting Line, Emotional Sediments and Drawings from the Drawer. Old addresses, including exhibition and QR code links, redirect to their new pages, so nothing already shared or printed leads to a dead end.
News the artist publishes herself
Exhibitions, performances and workshops change month to month, so the news section is built for the artist to run. She writes an entry in the CMS, saves it as a draft and publishes when it is ready. Published pages refresh on their own, without a rebuild or a developer.
Two languages, one practice
Her audience is local and international: collectors, curators and gallery visitors in Split, and people who discover her work from abroad. Every page, collection and news entry exists in English and Croatian, with its own URLs and metadata, so each visitor reads her in their language and search engines show the right version.
Privacy that really asks first
The site uses Meta advertising to reach new audiences, so consent had to be done properly. Nothing from Meta loads until a visitor explicitly accepts. Accept and Decline carry equal weight, the choice can be changed at any time from the footer, and scrolling or closing the banner never counts as a yes. When someone sends a message through the contact form, only the fact that a contact happened is recorded, never what they wrote or who they are.
The architecture at a glance
The site is a single Next.js application with Payload CMS built in, backed by PostgreSQL. One codebase and one deployment keep it simple to run and easy to change.
- Pages are rendered on the server and cached, so they are fast and fully readable by search engines.
- Payload CMS manages collections, works, news, contact messages and site settings in both languages.
- The stack runs in Docker and ships through an automated pipeline that type-checks, lints and runs tests before every release.
The result
Alma Čače now has a fast site that looks like her work instead of a theme. The full portfolio is online in two languages, she publishes her own news, old links still work, and visitors spend their time with the paintings, which is what an artist's website is for.
Check it out: https://almacace-art.hr