We’ve recently launched a website and blog for author James North. James needed a website to augment the release of his upcoming book Deep Deception on 8th November and there was only a 3 week window to get the site designed and built.
In order to meet this tight deadline without cutting any corners, we teamed up with Scream Blue Murder who have been an absolute pleasure to work with. Bouncing ideas back and forth over instant message and collaborating with tools like Bitbucket has made this one of the most fun projects we’ve ever had.
The site itself is more complex than it first appears. Wanting to keep things simple for James to manage, we used a custom post type for books which are essentially a big form that gets filled in with info about a particular book. This info is then pulled from the database to compile the ‘Books’ and ‘Future Releases’ pages, with books moving from one to the other depending on their release date. The same technique is used on the homepage – on the release day of a book, it is automatically shown on the homepage as the latest release without James having to manually change any content.
The site is retina ready, fully responsive and adapts to the device it’s being viewed on. For an extra performance boost, the homepage carousel is only displayed to users on screens that are 1024px or more to save mobile users downloading the hi-res retina images. Without the carousel, the total weight of the homepage is just 312.5KB and even with the carousel, it’s only 696.9KB – not bad when you consider the average homepage weights in at around 1.5MB and that’s only going up.
Please visit the website James North Thrillers and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. If you would like a new website for your business, contact us, we would love to hear your plans.
A HUGE thank you to Scream Blue Murder for making this happen!