20th September 2014
You may notice that bookangel.co.uk is getting a few new features and updates between now and October.
When bookangel.co.uk was originally built, it was our club site. We expected it to take between four and six e-books a day. It is now featuring nearly a hundred. The original pinboard system broke when it reached twenty books a day, as people could no longer find books, and we’re now having the same problem with the shelving system. The emails are now getting ridiculously long. The site, which we thought would get ten visitors a week is now on nearly 2,000 unique visitors a week and the mailing list is longer than we expected.
We’re going to add genres, allow users to refine their books email by genre, and see about improving the listing system, since it has turned into a larger site than we expected.
What we are adding:
Improved navigation – users should be able to narrow down the books by category (today, upcoming etc.) and genre. Category navigation has been added as of 13th September. Genre navigation is under way.
New Genres – the current selection proved inadequate as there are over 1,000 books in some categories, and there’s been an ongoing problem with people using young adult fiction for non-fiction books. A range of new genres should allow users to break it down further. (beta up 16th September)
Sponsor the site – authors may featured one paid book for one week for a cost of $5. (beta up 15th September). This is largely because of the huge cost of bandwidth.
Report this post – a way to report that a book needs updating. We are also looking for a way for authors to report changes like new covers automatically. (beta up 16th September)
Reviewers – both on the site itself, and more tie-ins with blogs who want backlinks and publicity for their reviews. If you are interested contact us.
A Contact page – We have actually not realised the contact page had not ported. This will probably be linked from the footer to save space.
The homepage – the original page had newsletter and twitter signup on the front page. These may be re-added, as the number of signups dropped sharply once we changed the site format.
Newsletters – we are looking at upgrading to a system that allows users to customise the content of their email, by genre etc, so users will only see the books they are looking for. We also want to add a note to show if a book has been reviewed on the site or by a third party.
Twitter – the tweets are now going to contain hashtags targeted for genre instead of simply #free #ebooks. Amazon titles will contain #kindle if no genre is available. This should hopefully reach a more focused audience.
There are also some back end improvements going on. The way images are served has been changed to a new system which massively improves speed and lowers server load. As a result some books do not have cover images on the shelf during porting.
We are also hoping to change ad provision from Adsense to Project Wonderful as Adsense, despite our complaints, have failed to remove objectionable ads from rotation. These ads have been blocked, but please notify us if you see anything further.
Dropped:
Goodreads reviews: We had looked at adding these to the site, but these reviews are already well syndicated and publicly available. They are also largely overseas and not targeted at a British audience. On further consideration, they don’t really add to the site.
Bookclubs: The maintenance and spam proved an issue. If someone wishes to maintain or run one we can provide the infrastructure, but we’re a little busy reading books to run one ourselves.
If there is something else you’d like to see or a facility you would like us to add, please let us know here.
