Babel-Bridge Rights
Technologies
Challenge
Building a website for a literary agency, that will be able to display books and details about territories where it's sold, where the rights are purchased, authors, news and catalogues.
The agency required the option to have custom catalogues as well as newsletters that would only be addressed to certain Publishers. All the content needed to be created with books existing in the system we'd create.
This turned into creating dynamic content for MailChimp newsletters via API.
Books and catalogues need an option to be downloadable as PDF for offline use/share.
Solution
We decided to create a website based on a Laravel backend and VueJS front-end that is powered by a VPS on DigitalOcean and uses GitHub actions to deploy updates to the application from the repository.
We approached the design with a very minimalistic mindset, wanting to keep the pages as clean and clear as possible, focusing on the actual content.
Key features
Account request
Publishers and editors can request an account and get access to private materialsAdvanced search
Books can be found using filters that update results in real-timeDownload as PDF
A book presentation or catalogue can be downloaded as a PDF for offline readingCatalogues
Create public catalogues by selecting books from the systemBook Fair follow-ups
Create private catalogues for a publisher accessed via a custom linkCustom newsletter
API integration with MailChimp to use templates and generate dynamic newsletters
Book Presentation
The book page is structured in a way that presents all the information available about the book, author, genres and territories sold.
The same clean and minimalistic design is used here. This approach helped with the PDF generation process.
Book Fair Catalogues
Catalogues can be created by selecting existing books, this will group them into a catalogue. The catalogue has a custom cover and it's available on a dedicated page, where they are grouped per year.
A catalogue can be downloaded as a PDF when you access it, this way can be used offline or shared via email containing the list of books available in it.
Search and Highlights
The home page contains all the useful information to help you navigate the site. The top part is a slider with the most recent books being featured, a news section is also present on the right side.
Below we have a search area that works with filters that update in real-time.
With a different background color, we have a highlighted section where certain books are selected to appear.
Dynamic newsletters
We integrated our system with MailChimp API so we can make use of templating in order to generate custom newsletters with content from our system.
The idea was to be able to send a custom newsletter to certain publishers showcasing books that might interest them with a personalized message.
