Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Family and Friends

Lots has been going on here at Turner-Riggs headquarters. For one, you may know that we have a new intern: Georgia Kate Riggs was born early at just over five pounds in ... February. Your thank-you card is coming if you sent us something! Thank you!

Though she is amazingly gentle and as low impact as a baby can be, Georgia’s arrival was (a) early and (b) coupled with spinal surgery for me. And we have a three-year-old. And I wasn’t done work. And I needed to get my driver’s license. It was all a bit crazy, truth be told.

I finally went on mat leave in April while Craig continues to drive the bus (have you checked out Canadian Bookshelf yet? It’s still developing, but it’s already a thing of beauty. More on that in another post).

Before I went, though, we had the great opportunity to work with Elizabeth Hay on her new website, timed to sync with the launch of her bestselling new novel and one of the season’s major releases, Alone in the Classroom. We worked on the site with our friend Don Aker from AgencyZed, and hired the design talent of Aires Almeida at Operativ. We built it in WordPress with some special AgencyZed sauce added in.

For us, in addition to the usual priority of developing a site that really felt right to Liz in terms of look and feel, we wanted to see how much we could play with WordPress to make it accommodate features an author would appreciate. Turns out a lot: we were pleasantly surprised by how flexible and extendible WordPress is. We were able to provide automatic linking to event and news items for Liz, to incorporate some nice display widgets for covers and FAQs, and to whittle down the back end of the administration so it’s nice and easy for her to change or add things herself whenever she feels like it.

She’s happy, we’re happy, and it was a dream to work with not only an author I have admired for years but also a lovely, warm woman we now consider a friend.