A Serious Look at the Future
I’ve blogged sporadically before of the current rift of problems we’ve been experiencing with the Double Edge Press website and its counterpart website for Hummingbird World Media. To recap, I’ve been unable to upload any new images since before the beginning of this year. It was possible to place Skylar Hamilton Burris’ book on the site only because I had previously uploaded the image so to present it here on this blog prior to its publication. By the time the pub date rolled around, the website platform produced only an error message with any image uploads.
I cobbled together a replacement home page on a different website provider and was able to do this for free because of the very limited amount of pages I was using. Still, when it came time for Jim Spurr’s third book, Reflections in the Wake, the lack of our normal info page for his title was a sore spot. Still, I held off, as I simply didn’t have the time to truly think about how I wanted to revamp the site (and since I had just put some considerable time and effort into completely revamping it last year, I was no where near eager to go through that process again already).
Now, with two additional titles being released, that makes a total of three books that are getting short-shrifted in the info department. The time has come to seriously begin revamping how the web-site works and to begin shedding of the old site in favor of the new.
I’ve dipped a small toe in the water already with the addition of this page:
which can be accessed from the main Double Edge Press page by clicking the button on the right side of the main navigation bar at the top of the page, named, aptly enough, Buy Books. Despite the ease of this handy-dandy feature, there are several things I don’t like about it. One is that the descriptions will not accept apostraphes, making for some awkward spaces in place of it. Second is that I’m unable to dictate any type of shipping charges, which seem to be based on a percentage of the sale rather than on the actual weight of the books. Third, I’m not seeing at this point any way to charge for shipments going outside of the U.S. Fourth, I’m not able to communicate with customers basic information such as when they can expect their order to ship, when it has shipped, and shipping tracking numbers so that they can not only see when it went out but can track its progress and know when to expect it to arrive.
In other words, compared to what I’m used to working with, its rather primitive. Still, I’m early into how the new stie works and their may be some good alternatives once I really start poking around. In the meantime, sales will be possible through the old links as well as the Buy Books button on the nav bar.
The other thing that will take some thought and implementation is exactly how I want to format the new site. I love the smooth transition of pages of the old site with their neato-coolo page fades and sweeps, but I knew even when I was building them that it would be problematic for the long-term future. As we grow in titles, the thumbnails of each book on the right hand side becomes impractical. We’re getting to the point where we need to categorize titles. Which leads me to thinking about what categories I want to add and fill with upcoming releases. The addition of Jerry Cypher’s new book is the first in a ’self-help/inspirational’ category, and I foresee his coming books as fitting into ’self-help/Christian resources’ category, along with one or two other titles I was presented with in Florida.
So as I move forward, don’t be surprised if one day you stop in to check out DEP and the old look is simply gone and replaced with the new. How it will all come together in the end, I’m still not certain, but it is one of the things that I will be working on behind the scenes in the coming days.
Everyone have a good Thanksgiving (and I know I blogged that on my last post, but I’m fairly certain that this time I won’t be back in before the holiday).
