New website launches for best-selling author, Philippa Gregory

The second site, launched five years ago, was recognised by Awwwards and NET magazine for its industry leading features. Since then, a lot’s changed. Not only in terms of design trends and user behaviour, but also in the way both readers and viewers consume their favourite books and shows. So, alongside the essential technical upgrades it was time for a visible change in the user experience. Our objective was to follow in the footsteps of the content streaming giants and craft a website experience that felt intuitive and informative as well as being fit for the future.

As with every digital project we started by working closely with Philippa, her team and her publisher Simon & Schuster to identify the key users, understand their goals and map out the user journey. This allowed us to sketch wireframes for key pages. With such a wide readership, spread across an international audience, there were a number of user challenges to consider.

Despite her traditional hardcopy past, many of Philippa’s readers are now consuming her books digitally through audiobooks, e-readers, tablets and phones. Nowadays digitally savvy readers expect more. They want to find more books in the same series, understand how books and storylines are interconnected or related. They also expect to be able to preview audio snippets, find the story behind the book, understand chronology, or even find a translated version of a book. And they want to be able to do all this quickly and in one place.

With such an impressive back catalog of books, including the White Queen which was turned into a Golden Globe nominated series by the BBC, Philippa’s fans could often be reading different books, from different series, at different stages. As a result, the presentation and timelines of books had to be carefully considered.

The revamped news section offers updates, videos and posts from Philippa. Browser friendly audio snippets, better use of video and imagery provides far richer experience and visual appeal, helping to bring the worlds Philippa creates to life and better promote her books.

Overall the new website is a natural visual evolution of the online brand but one that is closely aligned to the needs and trends of 2019. As ever, a lot of love and hard work has gone into this project and building on the success of the previous website was a challenge but one we loved being part of.

You can visit the new website here.