Web redesign, development, and SEO for online bookshop Read & Co.
Easier to update. Easier to use. Easier to shop.
Read & Co., a half-century-old UK-based bookseller and publisher, needed a modern way to sell literary classics.
We built a beautiful, speedy, accessible website around their impressive catalogue of books, and created a streamlined, scalable back-end that’s compatible with specialist publishing industry data streams.
A front-end optimised for search and shopping.
From the very first redesign wireframe, we added clickable titles and author names under every book cover, and replaced flat graphic banners with dynamic sections.
We increased keyword presence by over 300% (improved SEO), rendered every word as live text (better accessibility and mobile design), and boosted internal links by 200% (quicker navigation).
We sped up website load times by around 90%. Faster browsing = happier customers, more sales, and higher search rankings.
We designed an arsenal of bespoke drag-and-drop sections, including carousels, grids, and featured segments, empowering the Read & Co. team to update their website quickly and easily — perfect for when customers are searching for seasonal reads or trending books.
We also built a live view into the website editor, allowing Read & Co. to ensure their updates look good for shoppers, across all screen sizes.
A back-end optimised for speed and ease.
Our bespoke back-end set-up made Read & Co.’s industry-standard book database simple and swift to manage. Plus, with no additional effort, info about thousands of books shows up in more places.
Stronger SEO. Faster workflow.
We united Read & Co.’s huge catalogue of carefully-categorised books with an intuitive page builder, enabling the client to create galleries based on authors, series, and imprints in mere seconds.
They can make landing pages quicker than you can say ‘BookTok trend’.
By freeing Read & Co.’s website from the shackles of obsolete plug-ins and refining the back-end architecture, we made it possible for the website’s product library to be connected to third-party datasets.
The classics of yesterday, ready for the web of tomorrow.
