PS Publishing

Sticking with the theme of genre fiction for this second post in a series of publisher website reviews, let’s move from newcomer Angry Robot to a more established player. PS Publishing will need no introduction to British fans of horror, science fiction, or fantasy. They’ve been printing novels and novellas for a decade now, and have their own magazine, Postscripts. They regularly pick up awards, both for individual titles and for the operation as a whole, and on the few occasions that I’ve had contact with them, they’ve also seemed like very nice people.

Their business model centres on short runs of high-quality editions; often a trade edition will be accompanied by a few slipcased copies or a signed limited edition, providing something nice for collectors and helping to cover the title costs. I suspect that direct sales are a big part of this model, so it should be interesting to see how their website works.

Structure of the Site

The PS Publishing site is split into two subdomains: most of the content is held in an e-commerce system on store.pspublishing.co.uk, while the blog/news site is a WordPress installation operating on news.pspublishing.co.uk. Although it’s usually ideal for SEO to have everything in one subdomain, some people do prefer to keep WordPress (which isn’t particularly secure) safely away from e-com content. They’ve done a good job of integrating their site design into the two different templates, although there could be a more obvious way of getting from the news site back to the e-commerce section.

Tech & Tags

SEO on the pages for individual books could use some work, depending on what the e-com system allows: title tags are generic (“PS Publishing Best Sellers” or “PS Publishing Latest Titles”), there’s no meta description, and no use of h1 tags, etc. A little work there (and could the urls be better written to reflect book titles?) could have substantial impact on search rankings and click-through for these pages.

User Experience

Arriving at the site is a little like diving straight into the middle of a busy mail-order catalogue. The content of the main page is a set of book covers, and the sidebars are lists of more titles. It’s a little overwhelming, and if you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, it’s difficult to know where to start. It would be nice if there was a little more editorial content to introduce the list, with maybe one or two recent key titles highlighted with links to the rest of the catalogue, rather than plunging the user straight in.

Information overload continues as you browse the site: both the main site and the blog have two sidebars, with an awful lot going on in each one. The “Latest Titles” and “Bestsellers” menus unfortunately rather resemble Adsense text ads, and I wonder whether this doesn’t make regular web users a little ad-blind to them. The addition of cover images, even tiny ones, to those menus might help with that, as would removal of the borders. (There are a lot of boxes here.) Two sidebars—making three navigation systems if you include the horizontal bar at the top—may also be a little much: I’ve done a few site revamps lately where reducing the navigational options has actually seemed to have a positive effect on user experience, keeping the focus on the content and fewer, more intuitive navigational paths.

The pages dedicated to individual titles are clean and informative. Where they have a book in more than one edition (e.g. a regular hardcover and a jacketed edition) there are separate pages for each edition, which creates quite a bit of repeated information. If their system allows it, I might be inclined to combine these into one page, with a panel listing the relative merits of the different editions; this might create a slimmer, stronger set of pages, with less risk of their competing with each other for inbound links. (In general, I think publishers need to think of separating their books into “titles” rather than “isbns” when it comes to putting their catalogues online.)

In terms of browsing, I’d like to be able to browse the PS Publishing titles by genre, and it’s a shame that there are no individual author pages here, because I’ve often wanted to find out more about their authors, either because they’re new to me or because they’re old names and I’m curious about what they’ve been up to in the last few years. (For example, it would be nice to have a page with an updated Ramsey Campbell bio and a list of his PS titles). This may be difficult to implement, however: one of the problems with using off-the-peg solutions like this e-commerce software is that you’re effectively limited to the kinds of pages these can create.

The shopping cart looks quick and simple to use, and shipping prices and info are easy to find in the terms & conditions. I’d be comfortable buying from this site, which is more than I can say for some publishers’ sites. In fact, I should buy something from them soon: I like what they do, and I think they do it well.

Conclusion

Although the navigation is sometimes confusing, and the boxy sidebar menus make the site look a little dated, the passion that PS Publishing have for what they do really does come across in this site.

They’ve taken an interesting step in building the whole of the main site on an off-the-peg e-com system, and they’ve obviously put a lot of thought into making the most of it… however, I do think it’s limiting them. A publishing house as interesting and unique as PS Publishing needs more editorial content to introduce itself to new readers, and other pages like author bios would really help them out. (These could always be built as pages on the WordPress side, using a special template, and linked from the e-com site.)

It’s great that the shopping cart is so easy to use, and the blog/news is updated regularly. Although the posts are all promotional (it is intended as a newsroom, rather than a blog), the posts are chatty and well done.

So, a great job given the tools they’ve chosen to use, but a little refinement to the menus (fewer, more contextual) and navigation could go a long way, and some more editorial content on the main site could help to draw in new users.