A lot of these sites have extensive behind-the-scenes programming functions - for example,
The Lisa Ekus Group is a public
relations firm for major players in the culinary arts field. One arm of The Lisa Ekus Group publicizes
their clients' cookbooks, and we put up a catalog every 3 to 4 months of the new books they represent.
There is a form that people in the media industry can use to request review copies of the various books
in the catalog, which usually contains between 20 and 30 books. Prior to my redesign of their website,
the LE Group office staff had to manually handle all the review copy requests, and forward the requests
for individual books to each individual publisher — this often meant for every reviewer filling out
the form, there would be 20 to 30 separate emails needing to be manually forwarded, and there are usually
between 40 and 60 reviewers that request copies — that's a LOT of manual forwarding of emails.
When I created the new site, I simply programmed up a custom form for the review copy request system that
references a small database of what publicist gets which book request, and the site automatically directs
the requests to the proper publicists, while building a database of reviewers that have filled out the form,
and providing a notification to the Lisa Ekus Group of the request having been made, and for what. It saves a
few man-hours, and eliminates mis-directed emails.
I also added a dedicated site-search function of my own design, and such items as a Printer Friendly function,
which reformats pages and eliminates web specific elements such as navigation buttons, etc., and automatically
brings the print dialog up.
This kind of custom work is what I'm known for, and why I say I make websites that WORK for you!
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