Mugo partner since 2016
Open Book Canada showcases Ontario’s literary scene, with a focus on books and events produced by the province’s independent, Canadian-owned publishers.
The story of Open Book’s evolution starts with three separate websites: Open Book Toronto, launched in 2007, followed by sister site Open Book Ontario in 2010, and then Open Book Explorer. All three brands were designed to showcase and celebrate books and book culture in Ontario, each with a slightly different angle and approach. But all three had been built on Drupal-based sites, which, over time and with every addition, had become unwieldy, overly complex, and were failing at their objective to manage and showcase great content.
The Organization of Book Publishers of Ontario (OBPO) contracted with the Association of Canadian Publishers (ACP) and its 49th Shelf team to leverage to work they had done on 49th Shelf and its eco-system of book publishing websites, to consolidate the three existing sites into a single, reimagined Open Book site.
The new site needed to enable to Open Book Canada to achieve its goals to:
The resulting website is a widely read and highly regarded online magazine with a robust editorial program that supports multiple posts per day, a writer in residence, and an active events listing service to promote readings, book launches, and other literary events throughout Toronto and the rest of Ontario. The site is supported by book data from 49th Shelf, a linkage that will eventually see Open Book evolve into the largest-ever online platform dedicated to Ontario books and authors.
Open Book is now part of a community of major literary websites in Canada all maintained by the same systems and technology, including the eZ Publish CMS, that enable us to leverage and publish content, including rich ONIX publishing data, with ease. Its relaunch in fall 2016 was received with great enthusiasm by the literary community.
Learn more about our ecommerce websites for book publishers.
Tabbing through a web page can be a frustrating experience. The user tabs to access a menu, but with the keyboard's next tap, they’ve moved on to another page element and have to retrace their steps to access the desired content.
For users who rely on keyboard navigation, this can be a major accessibility roadblock. And for other site visitors, it’s just poor UX.
Fortunately, you can implement a fairly straightforward function in JavaScript called a “focus trap” to ensure users don’t leave the page area they’re in without intending to do so.
Mugo partner since 2024
An initiative led by the Northern Lights Library System to promote library services to Indigenous communities
WordPress can be a great option for easy website development, but because of the rapid evolution of the CMS, it can lead to inefficient code and slow loading pages. We'll show you how to clean up unused CSS and JS from pages to improve site-wide performance.
CAPTCHA is an essential need on online forms, but to be blunt, the UX sucks. Without the implementation tips (helpfully detailed below), Google’s otherwise reliable reCAPTCHA service implemented “as-is” doesn’t actually provide any browser validation. The user will have to wait for it to make a time-consuming round trip to the server. It’s a problem for anyone and becomes compounded for users with accessibility needs.
Mugo partner since 2024
Delaware County Libraries is a regional library system in Pennsylvania, USA.
Mugo partner since 2024
Dymax is a developer and manufacturer of broad-spectrum light-curable adhesives.
Mugo partner since 2024
Hibu provides digital marketing solutions to local businesses across the US.
Links are among a website's most valuable components. They connect (that’s what the word “link” means, after all) different pages and resources, helping site visitors find the content they are looking for. Well-planned and formatted links are like a detailed, intuitive treasure map that sends visitors to the right destination.
Links are also critical for making your website accessible to visitors with visual or other impairments. A link that lacks important information can prevent some visitors from accessing all the treasures a website holds. Or even worse, it can send users to completely undesirable content and discourage them from exploring all your site has to offer.
In this post, I’ll discuss how to present links in various contexts, clearly explaining how they can create and inform powerful relationships between different pages and assets.
Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
