Vintage Books, Paypal and the Web
During the last couple of months I have been fortunate enough to produce websites for 2 different authors and publishers (It is weird how I have never done any work for an author and then 2 months in a row…)
Anyway this first example is an online store redesign for a fabulously done book about Vintage Hairstyling by Lauren Rennells, excellent idea for Christmas gifts btw.
Lauren Rennells: Hair and make-up artist Lauren Rennells works in the photography and film industry. She freelances providing unique designs for advertisements, films and television. Her passion for hairstyles of the past led her to the writing of Vintage Hairstyling: Retro Styles with Modern Techniques.
Vintage Hairstyling: Retro Styles with Modern Techniques is a step-by-step guide showing how to create hairstyles from the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s using simple, easy-to-follow instructions. It uses over 700 brand new photographs and illustrations and detailed directions in a 164-page full-color book.
The #1 criteria of this website was that it had to have a retro vintage design and the book needs to be the focus. After many hours researching and struggling with ideas, taking pictures of textures, scanning fabrics, downloading images from iStock for interface graphics (note – because of the price, when a customer knows about iStock that is always the first place they want to check for incidental types of images or graphics, would not be my choice if the image is the focus of a campaign)… We created .gif .png icons out of pictures from her book, cut-out stock images I had in the northerncoloradostock.com archive, various hair styling accessories…
The crazy thing is that most of our ideas ended out getting scrapped in favor of the very simple and fun interface we came up with. See it here at Vintage Hairstyling.
While you are at it take a look at the book, among other things there is a sneak a peak page that was done with lightbox using customized colors and graphics in the CSS to fit the main site’s theme. Also the book can be bought through paypal, this is an excellent feature for smaller sites. The cost for online commerce hosting is anywhere from $29.95 – $49.95 / month! The paypal option has no monthly hosting costs and you can accept credit cards easily!
The bottom line is that Lauren says her book is selling more consistently with her new website…the proof is in the pudding.
