Creating a Book Promotion Website Using Joomla

Digger's Story

The latest website created by Webilicious ® is to promote "Digger's Story", a book by David Barrett and Brian Robertson and published by Five Mile Press. The book is David's own true story of his experience as a young soldier and prisoner of war of the Japanese and his subsequent journey in seeking and gaining reparations for all Australian prisoners of war.

As with any type of website I haven't tackled before, I usually follow these or similar steps:

• find out about best practice from experts in the particular field
• find inspiring website examples of the same type
• draw up a list of essential and desirable features
• find suitable Joomla extensions to implement essential and desirable features
• create the website and then evolve in consultation with the client

From research undertaken about book and author promotion websites, it appears a common complaint is a lack of contact details for the authors and/or the publisher. To address this, I have included contact details at the bottom of every page to ensure I don't make the same mistake.

From research and discussion with the client, it became clear that essential features would need to include some exclusive content to encourage visitors to subscribe to the mailing list, author biographies and photos, an events calendar, a press kit to make it easy for media folks to help with publicising the book, a way for visitors to interact, some inside information about the book, ordering information and social networking links.

Book Promotion Features

A summary of the features that were chosen to be implemented together with the corresponding solutions are as follows: