Opportunity
Authors William Burtch and Donna Burtch were in need of a website to promote sales of their upcoming book “W.G.”
To create a professional image in the community and begin to build membership, partnerships, and traction, they required a set of marketing elements with a consistent, contemporary, and recognizable look and feel. They knew a logo, branding scheme, and website were essential in creating brand awareness.
Start-up:
The clients provided me with plenty of imagery, keywords and examples from their publisher to give me a good foundation for the research phase. After nailing down the structure of the site, I sent 2 options for the overall look and feel of the home page that included their book cover, how to sign up for updates, a summary, author bios and reviews they had received. Since the book is a historical non-fiction, it was fun to be able to utilize vintage colors as overlays on background images, but pops of a deep red were added in as the accent.
To the left you can see one of the design options that was ultimately not chosen.
Build:
The design process went smoothly, due in part to the ease of working with these clients, but I was just as excited as them to build out each remaining page. I had done an abundance of research of books, historical biographies, the civil war and W.G., the subject of the book. I photoshopped some of the provided images to match the color scheme we had chosen. I utilized Elementor (as the client would like the ability to make small edits themselves) and only 2 other plugin: WPForms and Sucuri. The site was developed through Local and hosted off my computer until it was ready to migrate to their domain: wgthebook.com.
Ongoing management:
Since the book will be released sometime in May 2022, any mention of “Coming Soon” will eventually need swapped out for “Buy Today!” We set up a quarterly management plan to allow for those future updates, as well as plugin and hosting maintenance.
