We worked to redesign and relaunch a longtime client’s site. She specializes in Japanese style acupuncture and we reworked the navigation, suggested content, and worked with her on the design. This is an example of a Squarespace customization.
TitlePager
We launched TitlePager™ in the Fall of 2017 to support authors as they market their books. As we work with authors to build out sites we thought that there was a need for a less expensive option that was filled with features but simpler for an author to manage. One that gives them the control and ownership that an Amazon, Goodreads (part of Amazon), or publisher catalog page doesn’t. Also, we wanted to support all of the fabulous indie authors brave enough to put their work out to the world. So after attending a hackathon at MIT where we created a prototype we came back and spent months creating TitlePager.
TitlePager creates professional marketing sites for authors with the click of a button. TitlePager takes the ISBN and pulls information from Bowker’s Books-In-Print such as the cover, summary, and bibliographic information. It also makes buy-it-now links to a variety of online retailers. From this default page, an author can then pick from 20 color schemes, add reviews, video, an excerpt, social links, an excerpt, upcoming events, and links to a mailing list and giveaways. Once you subscribe to either a monthly or yearly plan you get to choose a custom TitlePager sub-domain this could be the name of your book or your author name, and if you own your own URL you just need to let us know and we will work with you to set it up for free. After you publish you also get a code to use to add your other books for free. Then you can connect them and create a multibook site.
It takes about fifteen minutes to set up a TitlePager site and you can come back and edit them anytime. We feel that they make a great homebase connecting your social activities and your readers. If you want a site that holds all of your other writing, and a blog then we would love to talk about building that out for you but if you want a powerful online presence to refer people to when they hear about your book then we hope you try out titlepager.
Recent Launches
DanZanes.com and refreshes to Ronsuskind.com and LifeAnimated.net
Dan Zanes
We launched a new site for Dan Zanes, a musician, who is often in rotation in our houses. One of Dan’s goals is to make his music accessible and encourage people to play more and start family bands. The site keeps fans up to date and also has a songbook with lyrics and guitar chords for easy playing and video lessons. We worked with his in house designer who took iconic illustrations from his albums to create the headers and buttons that carried his whimsical look and feel to the site. The chords on the song pages come from a really interesting js library and project called jtab.
Adding song lists, chords, and notation to lyrics on WordPress Genesis Themes
We are building a new site for a musician and one of the features is a songbook where we are posting his songs for people to discover and play. As a so-so guitar player I often grab songs from sites like chordie and I wanted to give visitors a similar experience so after a bit of searching and experimenting I’ve found a combination of plugins and a jquery powered chord library that give me the effect I was after. I thought I would share what I’ve learned.
The first part is a songbook. One could do this by hand but wp-songbook does a nice job. It creates a custom post type and adds meta data and the ability to add videos and files, and tag it with album, genre, language, date, and author info into a sortable list. In this case we are uploading songsheets as .pdfs to go with the songs. It has some very nice options for what to display on the list and individual page. I’m not crazy about some of the plugin authors design choices but they can be overwritten in the plugin’s css.
The plugin creates a song page item. On this page I want to display the chords played above the lyrics and the chords themselves. To create this result I’m using a javascript library I found that draws chords and tablature, and a plugin that creates a shortcode for placing the chord names above the lyrics.
The chords above the song song lyrics are enabled by a plugin called chords and lyrics. It generates a shortcode that puts the chords of a song along the lyrics. The plugin hasn’t been updated in quite a while but I thought it was pretty simple and it works on 4.6.
The chords are being pulled in using jtab a javascript library that uses jquery.js and raphael.js to draw chords and full tab using css and svg graphics. I’m just using it to show the basic chords in the song but the library can be used to draw full tablature. One of the tricks to getting this working is to know that WordPress loads jquery by default and calling it again can break things so leave it out. We are building this site using the Genesis framework and have the script to the header of the pages by using the Genesis Custom Headers plugin which enables a lot of customization on a page by page basis, plugging it into the headers area of the Genesis theme settings works well too. Another way to do it would be to enqueue the libraries.
The song posts look like this in text view:
<div class=”jtab”>A E D Bm</div>
[chordsandlyrics]
my [a] daddy is an engineer
my [e] brother drives a hack,
my [d] sister takes in washin’
an’ the [bm] baby balls the jack,
an’ it [a] looks like
i’m [e] never gonna cease my [d] wander[a]in’.
[/chordsandlyrics]
For the library code in the header which is documented on the jtab.tardate site we;ve made the following change.
NOT USING THIS LINE –
Author Sites and Services
What can we say? We like books and we love working with authors to help them get their voices and projects out in front of potential readers. Each project is a bit different. Some authors blog and tweet others don’t, some have one book, others multiple titles. Some books have inspired community based projects. We addressed all of these situations. We know what happens to traffic when an author appears on a morning show and what happens the week after. We can help you build an online presence that works for your habits, that is easy for YOU to update, and we can help you build an audience. Our work ranges from single page sites for authors who have one book to multi-page sites for authors with multiple titles and articles. Our sites for authors range from fifteen hundred to five thousand dollars.
Authors we’ve worked with:
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney – author of the NYT bestseller The Nest
Ron Suskind – Pulitzer Prize Winning author of A Hope in the Unseen and recently Life Animated
Nina Kushner – Historian & author of Erotic Exchanges; The world of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth Century Paris
Alice Feiring – Wine writer & author of For The Love of Wine and the Feiring Line newsletter
Triss Stein – Mystery writer & author of Brooklyn Bones
F.L. Fowler – NYT Bestselling author of 50 Shades of Chicken
David Wessel – Head of the Brookings Institute and former WSJ columnist
Melissa Clark – NYT writer and cookbook author
Tony Hiss