Terri-ann White discusses UWAP's new website [21.06.2011]

In early June, UWA Publishing launched its brand-spanking, shiny new website, developed with style and care by Melbourne-based Inventive Labs. We reckon it’s as good looking a site as you’ll find anywhere, and very easy to navigate. Our press has just emerged from a makeover in the last few years which focused our purpose. We wanted our new site to be one of the most prominent ways to peddle our story. For the last three years, UWAP has featured in the national book design awards, winning and being shortlisted for the great look of our covers and internals. We needed to show this off.

But I will cut to the chase and list the imperatives we required to be supported by an effective website:

• as a tool to promote the selling of our books
• generating interest in our authors and our annual list,
• and being good citizens and sharing information and knowledge about books and ideas.

We are a university-based company and had tried valiantly to work within the strictures of the mass system of communications that a university website is. Our new site has seriously stepped away from the template that formalizes and standardizes disparate online spaces across a large organization such as a university. It is simply that those rules are not built around what is, effectively, a retail product. We could not use images big enough to make an impact (think thumbnail), and our old website was as difficult as the best of university websites are in general for navigating (endless dead ends, then side-steps taking you to Engineering or Human Resources).

Now we are out on our own and it feels good. We have started a blog and I’ve been charged with the responsibility of coming up with an interesting yarn on a regular basis (hopefully others will contribute). We’ve also launched an e-newsletter that enables us to showcase each month’s new releases, run competitions, give away books and announce events we and our authors are involved in.

It’s pretty clear that online congress is already the most effective way to get the message out about new books and we are focusing on ways to optimize this direct contact with our potential readers. That said, UWAP is also very keen to remain loyal to the idea of the noble art of bookselling, so we always defer our sales to physical bookshops instead of selling directly from the new site. Likewise, with ebook sales, we divert customers to Booki.sh (chiefly via Readings in Melbourne), Informit, Apple, Kobo and others. We wanted to give customers everything they need to make a transaction in buy one of our books, but not sell it directly to them.

We needed a one-stop place for media, authors, booksellers and readers to find information about our books, both new releases and the ever-important backlist. We at UWAP now think we’ve got it here with this new site. It certainly saves time to point people in the right direction and feel confident that they will find as much useful information as they would by having a conversation directly with one of us (a small team with a million tasks every day).

So, having now spruiked all the features we love about our new and beautiful site, we also want to ensure that people outside cities can access the information we are posting. It’s easy to forget how different things are in rural Australia where broadband can be rare and connectivity spotty. We are interested to receive feedback on what is working and what is a pain for our users.

The content management system Inventive Labs have set us up with is a dream –so easy to operate (or maybe it was just that our old CMS was a nightmare). Now it is up to us to keep the site fresh and as full of current information as we can manage. I welcome any feedback from visitors.

While you are there, have a look at the pictures of our new author Johan Harstad, a Norwegian ‘international sensation’, with his blockbuster, doorstop-sized and utterly charming novel Buzz Aldrin, What Happened To You In All The Confusion? Harstad will be visiting Australia in early 2012, but get in early and read the book now.

Terri-ann White has spent her working life around books and ideas: as a bookseller, writer, teacher, festival organiser, director of a cross-disciplinary research centre at the University of Western Australia, and now publisher at UWA Publishing. It’s a wonderful life.

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