The Brief
Ilex Press publish high quality illustrated reference books which cover all aspects of creativity and popular culture. They felt their existing site was a little tired and they were keen to focus more on fast moving news using the WordPress platform. The client also wanted a way to easily display and update their huge back catalogue with relevant blog posts tied into each release. A key requirement was that they wanted two home pages which filter ‘photo’ and ‘popular culture’ blog stories and books – with a third homepage which mixes the two together.
The Challenges
The biggest challenge by far was to integrate their internal Filemaker database of books with the WordPress database and present them like an eCommerce store. In addition the client wanted some nice touches like ‘coming soon’ stickers automatically added (and removed from) books based on date published. Each book also has relevant blog posts shown below it (where available).
Ilex were so pleased with the result that they asked us to create a similar site for their sister company ‘Ivy Press’.