Elizabeth Wein

Refreshed website for Elizabeth Wein by AlbanyWeb
original Elizabeth Wein website by AlbanyWeb

At a glance

What is it?
A literary website to boost a best-selling author

Elizabeth Wein is a best-selling Young Adult author who originally approached AlbanyWeb to convert her Google Sites site, so as to better display her novels.  Whilst the content remained the same, the new site was much easier for Elizabeth to update, and easier for her fans to navigate too.  We added:

  • a custom page layout to display and organise her catalogue of novels to better effect, including grouping into series. 
  • keyword-based menus, that would update automatically as new content was added.
  • a 'related items' feature so that all her historical, background, blog and press release content could be linked seamlessly and intuitively to each novel. 
  • a contact form and
  • integrated a Twitter feed.
  • created a special content space to honour the women who were in the Ravensbrück concentration camp, which had featured in one of her novels.

The changes we made, plus the SEO tools AlbanyWeb adds as standard, meant that traffic to her website increased from a couple hundred visits per month to over one thousand visits per month within a few weeks of the relaunch.

Refreshing the look

Recently, we gave her website a facelift, to give it a more visual feel.  After a couple of years of active use, she wanted to be able to do different things.  As part of this website refresh, completely redesigned the look of the site, featuring images from her latest novel.  We brought her blog 'in-house' (she had previously used an external tool), and kept her press release feed. 

We built the visual design with the intention of making it easy to change the main page feature and image, so that with each new novel, a mini-facelift can be done very quickly.

Elizabeth Wein is an author who researches her novels meticulously and provides a great deal of background information for readers, if they want to know more.  This section had gotten very large and needed some extra organisation, which we added, and made it quite automatic to keep it easy to update.

We were able to do this refresh without disturbing her existing content or making fundamental changes to the existing website infrastructure. 

Images:  the refreshed (top) and original website homepages.

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