Hey Everyone, for the past several months, we have not been keeping our website up to date. The reason for this is we have been working on building a new website. You may have seen it already, as it is now live. So why did we do this?
Well…as Off Shelf Books has been growing and expanding in content, we needed a way to organize and manage it better. We also wanted to have more customization for our website. It has been a very long time since we have had that. Actually…we have never had that…
I remember our very first website several years ago was with Blogger. It was great at first, but I never liked that my web address was forced to have ‘blogspot’ or ‘blogger’ attached to it. This is understandable as that is the cost of using a free platform. And while they had some cool templates, there were not enough choices that could make the site stand out and have its own identity. The restrictions and limitations of having a site on someone else’s platform led us to change course.
We then purchased our own domain which is what we are using today. And while it was nice to finally have our own domain and platform, as time went on, our catalogue was expanding. More content and different types were forming to the point, it was getting a bit too difficult to manage and organize. In order to stay on track and give users a better experience, we have now rebuilt our website, and hopefully it stays that way for years to come.
Is this website perfect? No. Will there be flaws with it? Probably. In fact, there is nothing amazing about this website. But it is a milestone as it gives us the ability to organize and scale our work in the future. We are still adding our content, so the site is a bit limited right now. It’s a work in progress, but the functionality is complete. So let’s take a quick look at it.
As expected, it is fully responsive to phones, tablets, and desktops. In desktop mode, the menu stays with you so you can easily navigate at any time. Our Home page is essentially our main menu in the form of hero banners. The only unique features is that there are a few carousels that give you quick access to our most recent content or blogs. Or if you do want to navigate to a specific article, just use our search bar. And oh yeah, right beside the search bar, we have this switch for those that want to read in dark mode.
The main page of this site is the Content, which will soon have nearly all of our videos from our YouTube channel. Our content is broken down into sections similar to our YouTube playlists There is nothing special about this other than many of these are now in the form of articles which people can read if they don’t want to watch the videos. But this will also be the section that may have some exclusive content that can’t be found on our YouTube channel because…well…it is only text, not video.
The next page is a good old fashioned blog. No fancy bells or whistles. It’s exactly what you would expect to see in a blog. This will have all various types of articles and announcements that will be related and possibly unrelated to faith based books. It’s really anything creative that may not fit anywhere in our Content page.
We now have a shop page…which is empty…We have no products to sell yet. We hope to have at least one item, but I don’t want to sell meaningless stuff. I want to sell stuff of value and quality. So I am still figuring that out. But also, this is more about future proofing this site and to have something ready in case we do sell some items in our shop. We will let you know if or when that happens.
And there is finally our About page, which gives a brief story about Off Shelf Books, and with a Frequently Asked Questions section that hopefully will address common questions I have been asked over the years. Within the About is our Contact form, which is a straight forward way to send us a message. We can’t promise we will respond or let alone in a timely manner. But we will read every message that is sent.
And that is it…Some of you may be wondering, “How is this website any different than your YouTube channel?” Well right now the answer is, there is not much difference. Just a few Blog posts and an empty Shop page. But as time goes on, there will be more blog articles and even some exclusive content ones that won’t be on YouTube. It’s also knowing that we now have the ability to add more unique exclusive content as we grow.
So welcome to our new online home…Thanks for your patience, and as always…keep exploring.
