Web site for Other Words Books
The brief:
Claire at Other Words Books specialises in books that have been translated into English from other languages.
Based in Scotland’s Book Town, Claire was keen to bring an often overlooked niche to a wider audience, so she began writing reviews of translated books and occasionally writing about the translators themselves.
She also wanted the option to sell books online but knew she would not have the volume of sales initially to justify a full online shop.
I so enjoyed the process of creating my website with Glendrian. Glenda and Adrian were there every step of the way and came up with some great ideas to make the finished site exactly what I wanted.
It was a pleasure to work with them and feel their enthusiasm for my project.
Their skills in customising my site coupled with their attention to detail and personalised service mean I would highly recommend Glendrian to others.
The aesthetics of the site were driven by the artwork of Claire’s son William, with a sunlit library forming the header for the site and an engrossed reader as the logo.
We added text to the logo and sampled colours to use for design elements throughout the site. We also added an animated strapline under the main menu in a typewriter style font.
How to review books
At first sight, reviewing a book seems a simple thing – you tell people the title and then write something about it.
However, there’s a lot of additional information to squeeze in such as author, publisher, genre, ISBN, publication date, etc and in this particular case translator and original language.
Rather than include this information in the written review, Claire uses a form with a number of standardised fields so that each review has a consistent set of data associated with it. The main benefit of this approach is that we were able to structure the website so visitors can sort or search through the reviews in different ways such as by author, publisher, genre, translator, etc.
We could have built the whole thing from scratch with a clever use of categories or tags and some custom programming but we knew from experience that a better solution might already be out there.
With a little research, we found an existing software add-on that was designed for handling book reviews. It wasn’t a perfect fit (there were no options for translator or language) but it provided a lot of the basic facilities that were needed.
Adrian added some custom coding to get things working just right and Claire’s website visitors can now browse through her stock by Author, Translator, Genre or the original Language.
Simple Selling
Claire wanted to be able to sell books online but wasn’t ready to go down the full online e-commerce route just yet.
So we extended the book review information to include prices and product details (such as whether a book is new or its condition if it isn’t) as well as a link to the contact page.
So if you’re looking for an interesting new read, why not take a look and see what Claire has to offer. You’ll find her website at www.otherwordsbooks.co.uk.
