groundwood

House of Anansi Press is Canada’s leading independent publisher, bringing readers award-winning and bestselling books from the realms of poetry, as well as fiction, nonfiction, drama, French-Canadian writers in translation, lifestyle, and authors from around the world.Founded back in 1978, Groundwood Books is one of the top children’s books publishers, with collections acclaimed for being ahead of the curve, justice oriented, and unafraid of touching stories that may be considered difficult or controversial.

VerticalWave Solutions brought the two major Canadian publishers together on a new, integrated e-commerce platform, migrating all of the content from the old sites. The new, modern Anansi+Groundwood website is developed on Shopify and integrates a series of custom features intended to vastly improve front-end user experience as well as the back-end management for system admins.

Together with the client, our team chose a modern theme and then customized it with a wide range of features and options. The theme was modded and customized to deliver enhanced UI and UX across all devices and screen resolutions. An intuitive product browsing system, based on catalogs, collections, genres and more, complemented by a quick preview and simple and efficient shopping cart provides users with an enriched shopping experience.

One of the challenges of the project was to migrate the entire content from the old sites to the new Shopify store. Using a series of scripts, ingestion apps and checkup procedures, our team managed to successfully transfer all of the orders, customers, blogs and products to the new platform and update them with the new tags, while also integrating them into the required collections and categories.

To make sure the site maintenance and product updates are quick and easy to perform, we configured the Shopify backend with an intuitive and easy administration interface in mind, keeping things accessible even for non tech savvy admins. From orders and payment processing to products sorting and configuration, everything is tight and easy to use.

The new Shopify Anansi + Groundwood platform is also designed and developed in compliance with WCAG – Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and the AODA – Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act rules. The site is accessible, sporting an optimal contrast, font sizes, image captions, tags and more and is compatible with most screen readers available today.
We’re proud to say the Anansi and Groundwood teams are extremely happy with our work. VerticalWave will continue to provide support s well as security and feature updates throughout the new site’s lifespan.