After hundreds of hours of programming, designing, and data entry, the ereads website launched yesterday.

About Ereads

E-Reads is a trail-blazing reprinter of out-of-print genre and general fiction and nonfiction by leading authors. Their books are available in all e-book formats and paperback. E-Reads was founded by literary agent, Richard Curtis.

About the Website: Before

Ereads.com used to be a blog website with ASP pages supporting a book catalog. Google’s “Blogger” was used to publish the blog and the books were updated via an simple ASP content management system. The old design had an out-dated look and only offered the bare minimum detail on books published by E-Reads. Another challenge was that E-Reads had all their book meta data in various spreadsheets on a local file server. It was a flawed system, but one that worked well for years.

About the Website: The Plan

The plan was to build a new website that was powered by a database with all the scattered meta data. It sounded simple enough, but there was a ton of work to do. First we needed to come up with a design for the website and a logical design for how the database would function. Production Manager, Nathan Fernald, was given the task of coming up with a new design, while I was charged with building the database and designing the engine.

About the Website: The Blood, Sweat, and Tears

After compiling all the data from various spreadsheets we found that we were missing about 60% of the data on over 1500 titles. Since the company was started 11 years ago buy an entirely different staff, we had no way to recover the missing data other than manual data entry. I built a CMS that had a database to fit all the meta data, imported all the excel spreadsheets, and began the attack on all the missing information. We had to add covers, isbns, sample chapters, retailers, contracts, missing authors and various other data into the system. In the end of all the work, the database grew to 90 thousand rows of data.

About the website: The Launch

Ereads.com is now powered by wordpress as well as a powerful new PHP engine (built by me :bows:). The CMS allows our staff to post books with sample chapters and an unlimited amount of retailer links. The blog had been designed to run faster and allow guest bloggers to make appearances from time to time.  Functions that the CMS provide are: production management, meta data exporting, contract tracking, rouge data filtering, a robust book search engine, and much more.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in this project.