Building the foundation — what we shipped this month
By Herehood Team
A quieter kind of update. Profile management, a welcome wizard, a buyer dashboard, error monitoring, and the SEO groundwork that makes everything findable.
Most of the work that matters on a platform like Herehood is invisible. It is the kind of work that makes the next thing possible — not the kind that gets a screenshot on social media. This month was mostly that kind of work.
Here is what changed.
A welcome that actually helps
When someone joins Herehood, they used to land on a dashboard with everything visible at once. It was honest but overwhelming. Now there is a three-step welcome wizard that appears after sign-up, tailored to the role you chose — artist, business, or neighbour. It walks you through the first things that matter: completing your profile, uploading your first piece of work, or browsing what is nearby. Once you have finished (or dismissed it), the wizard stays out of your way.
Alongside this, the homepage now asks a simple question above the fold: "What brings you here?" Three paths — discover art, exhibit your work, or display art in your space — each leading somewhere useful. The goal is to help people orient themselves before they need to figure out the navigation.
Profile management and role switching
You can now hold multiple profiles on a single Herehood account. An artist who also runs a cafe can switch between their artist profile and their business profile without logging out and back in. A neighbour who starts making art can add an artist profile without losing their saved artworks and order history.
This took more work than it sounds. Every page in the dashboard needed to understand which profile is active. The navigation, the sidebar, the data — all of it now respects which hat you are wearing.
A dashboard for neighbours
Until now, if you joined Herehood as a neighbour (someone who appreciates and collects art, rather than making or displaying it), your dashboard was mostly empty. That has changed. The neighbour dashboard now shows your recent orders with thumbnails and status, your saved artworks, and a feed of recently viewed pieces. There are also links to the gallery, the artist directory, and spaces near you.
Activity feed
Notifications used to live on their own page. Messages lived somewhere else. Space requests, artwork sales, open call updates — all scattered. Now there is a single activity feed at /dashboard/activity that combines everything in chronological order, with filter tabs so you can focus on what matters. The old notifications page redirects here automatically.
Error monitoring and conversion tracking
Two things that are entirely invisible to anyone using the platform, but critical for keeping it healthy.
First, Sentry is now integrated for error monitoring. When something breaks in production — a page crash, a failed API call, an edge case nobody anticipated — we know about it within minutes instead of waiting for someone to report it.
Second, we built a conversion funnel tracker. It follows the path from sign-up through verification, first artwork upload, and first sale. This is not analytics for marketing — it is a diagnostic tool. If artists are signing up but never uploading their first piece, we need to know where the friction is. The data stays internal and is never used for ranking or comparison.
SEO groundwork
We ran a full indexing audit and found that 44 public pages were missing canonical URLs — a basic signal that tells search engines which version of a page is the real one. Those are all fixed now. The platform has 62 pages with proper canonicals, 5 transactional pages correctly marked as no-index, and a clean sitemap. The robots.txt blocks what it should block and allows what it should allow.
None of this matters until Google Search Console is verified and the site is actually indexed. That step is next. But the foundation is in place for when it happens.
Social proof on signup
The sign-up page now shows live community counts — how many verified artists, how many spaces, how many neighbourhoods. It is a small detail, but it answers the question every new visitor has: is anyone actually here? The counts are real, pulled from the database, and cached for five minutes. When the community is still very small, the counter hides itself rather than displaying a number that would feel lonely.
What is next
The honest answer: the biggest thing blocking growth right now is not code. It is people. We need artists uploading work and businesses offering their walls. The platform is ready. The outreach templates are written. The verification pipeline works. What happens next depends on conversations — in DMs, in emails, in cafes.
If you know an artist or a business that might be interested, the most useful thing you can do is introduce them. That is how community platforms grow: one real connection at a time.
Follow along at @theherehood on Instagram.