Ford Street Publishing
Ford Street Publishing’s books explore themes of contemporary relevance, including childhood grief, ageing, interfaith issues, war, bullying and whaling. These themes are given a fresh and multi-layered treatment that is thought-provoking and entertaining. This reflects one of FSP’s distinguishing strengths and a further publishing goal: to provide children and young adults with literary works that explore the significant social issues of our time with intelligence and ingenuity.
Publishing high-quality books for children and young adults
Testimonial:
Min has worked long hours on our three websites and never flinched when we asked for changes and added to our original designs.
-- Paul Collins
The process has been seamless, right down from the get-go to the go-live and beyond. There’s also a warranty period where Min promptly assists with any queries.
We’re totally satisfied with the end results and wholeheartedly recommend Min to build your website/s at a competitive price.Director, Ford Street Publishing
Web project details:
Ford Street Publishing’s website was running an old version of Drupal that was in dire need of upgrades for security reasons and difficult for the client to modify without paying a developer to do so. The shopping cart process was painful and the shipping process relied on the customer manually adding a shipping token to their cart (for international orders).
Paul and his staff needed the back end to be upgraded and simplified; they needed an online shop to manage book sales, an automatic shipping calculator, and an attractive website that encouraged users to be excited about buying and reading the Ford Street Publishing titles, while using the established logo design. Users needed to be able to easily find the books they were after, by whichever author or illustrator they were interested in, and for whichever age group they were seeking.
There were also a wealth of brilliant reviews for each book that needed to be added, as there was no (proper) way to do this on the old website.
Having recreated Paul’s other websites, author website PaulCollins.com.au, and Creative Net Speakers’ Agency both in WordPress, he was keen to proceed with another WordPress transformation.
Woocommerce was modified and the core book shop was formed. Woocommerce ticks the simple and automated shipping process box, and also gives the client the ability to put items on sale (which we have scheduled for the entire year), offer users discounts through the use of coupon codes, and set up upcoming titles with a Pre-order option. The default Product page was modified heavily through the use of custom fields, so that the wealth of meta information available for each book was able to be input – not only teachers notes and other freebies for downloads, but hi-resolution cover images, awards won, and publication info.
Several advanced custom post types were created with the help of the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to accommodate authors, illustrators, editors and anthology contributors in a functional format. These authors were then linked to whatever book or books they were associated with, in whatever capacity they were associated with it. Each individual author, illustrator, editor and contributor then has their own profile page, on which all books they are associated with are listed.
Paul also wanted an integrated Newsletter solution to reach his 6000+ subscribers, and The Newsletter Plugin was customised to meet this need.
Finally an advanced search and filter system was set up using Search & Filter Pro, which, when hooked into Woocommerce’s product database, offers a very intuitive and comprehensive search mechanism.
Visually, this website was a challenge, because it took me about 10 revisions to finally settle on a look and feel that I was happy with before I even showed it to Paul! We settled on a neat look using the Ford Street green and several complimentary colours, for contrast. Coding wise, my goal was to implement all of the nice little design features, such as the 3D book covers and angles at the end of headings, through code – which I achieved through the use of CSS3 clip paths and transforms.
I honestly really enjoyed developing this site, because I loved being able to investigate the newest CSS techniques for achieving a design goal, and I love love LOVED being able to enter content once and then draw it through in as many different places as I wanted it to appear. The end result is a very content-rich website, whose relations are largely automated, meaning that it’s really easy for the client to update and maintain as there’s NO duplicate content to worry about.
One of my most complicated – and favourite – builds to date.