One of the projects I have been working on recently is the migration and update of the sherwinbeach.com website for the Sherwin Beach Press.
Keeping in mind that any website is always and forever a work in ongoing progress, the new site is now ready for prime time. (And has been, mostly, for about a week.)
Sherwin Beach Press
https://sherwinbeach.com/
Background
Dating back to 1999, the site was originally made of static files generated by the GoLive CyberStudio 3 WYSIWYG HTML editor and website management tool. (GoLive CyerStudio was later acquired by Adobe, where it became Adobe GoLive—which was discontinued in favor of Adobe Dreamweaver after 2007.) This first site was done by Martha Chiplis, then printer for Sherwin Beach Press, now director—and also my then-girlfriend and now wife, so this is a family business project. The site had a homepage, individual pages for the four books published at that time, and pages for details related to the books—things like enlarged images of individual pages and spreads.
This was later refactored in custom PHP with some functionality handled by custom JavaScript, adding a Contact page with a form that triggered an email and buttons to use PayPal to order books. There were now also pages for upcoming events and of links. To this point it was all desktop-first and not very usable on mobile devices, its designed having basically originated before mobile was much of a concern. This was site number two.
I migrated this version to new hosting sometime in 2023, got it set to serve over SSL, and and, to make it good enough, added new a responsive events page marked up with schema.org Event microdata, a new responsive links page, and a new responsive Contact page using a HubSpot form. I also adjusted the homepage to make it reasonably responsive for mobile. In the process of this site move, I also collapsed the PHP-generated pages into static HTML files to which I was also able to add Google Analytics tracking. Site 2.5.
New site
For the third iteration of the site, I moved things to WordPress. In this latest update, I took the desktop-first site and its information—text and image assets for each book—and I put it into a proper high-performance CMS with a mobile-first responsive front-end. Each book page was converted to a product page in a fully functional e-commerce system complete with inventory management, shopping card, online payment, etc. There are new navigation menus. Pages are rich in semantic metadata: Iused schema.org LD+JSON to describe entities —mostly books—and their relationships to on- and off-site knowledge graphs. I want these pages to show up in the right contexts in the right search results.
The copy for each book has also updated. Among other things, full colophon details are now there for each book. I’ve made some corrections, done some editing, and I’ve added some reviews and at least one short textual excerpt. In this process I also learned that George W. S. Trow’s introduction to the 1992 Sherwin Beach Press edition of his classic 1980 essay Within the Context of No Context is apparently not published anywhere else.
I hope the new site makes these wonderful books more prominent to a new generation of fine press book researchers and buyers.
