My fourth site launch in the last three weeks – will the madness never end?
Still and all, I’d rather have too much work than not enough. I’m still not quite convinced that this web design / development bubble won’t suddenly burst.
This website is for a book called This Way to the Sea, a rather lovely memoir by Gillian Nicholson of how she and her husband followed the sea change path, packing up their urban Sydney life and transplanting themslves to a banana farm on the NSW Mid North Coast.
Apart from doing justice to the book and the author, one of the things I enjoy about developing sites for books is thinking ahead and planning what will happen once the book has been on the shelves for a while.
In this case, as with a couple of others I’ve done, the site should evolve into an online home for the author rather than the one book. She has another book planned already.
I should probably also mention that the book was commissioned by my wife Hazel for Murdoch Books – whose website I also built and manage. In fact, Hazel has brought me quite a bit of work one way or another, for which I’m probably not grateful enough.
Another enjoyable factor in working on this site is the pleasure I get from helping a person very familiar with one medium to acclimatise to another.
Gillian’s background is in magazines, and she rose about as high as it’s possible to rise in the world of Australian lifestyle magazines. She’s now also a published book author, but her knowledge of the web is still in its infancy.
Mind you, she’s jumped in fearlessly (much in the way she and Christo seized the chance to move to Grassy Head), having established a blog and a flickr page as well the website I’ve built for her.
It’s nice to help provide a platform for someone to extend themselves.
I hope I’ve built something that Gillian will enjoy developing over time.