Slowly but surely, genres cometh!
We updated the bookshelves + filter soon!
Every two weeks, I share my notes on building Shepherd.com. Shepherd makes exploring and discovering new books fun (while helping authors get their books in front of the most likely readers). Please join us as a founding member if you want to support us.
March 27th to April 7th
My son brought home a tiny plague last week.
I am slowly recovering from that and hoping to be back at 100% in a few days (I haven’t been able to do a bike ride in over a week).
Genre & age timeline…
We should be ready to ship the genre/age filters before Marton (our awesome part-time dev) goes on a much-deserved vacation in May/June. I’ll know more next week as we plan.
I am reminding myself it takes time to build cool stuff :)
What did we add over the last 2 weeks?
We improved our bookshelf pages! We still have a few bugs we are working on; those will be fixed soon (ignore the repeat pictures and extra space below).
Check out the best books on India or travel books as examples.
Meet the experts
I want to show that passionate experts curate our books visually. And toward summer, we will add a page where readers can browse all the book lists on their own page.
Improved book cards
I wanted to show better that our curators are authors/experts. And drive more traffic to their list if it grabs a reader’s curiosity. We are seeing a significant increase in clicks from this section.
And if you click “Who is Charlie?” it opens to share their info and book list.
What’s next?
What’s next? Adding filters!
The designs are done, and the next step is implementation.
Here is what they will look like on the desktop…
So when they click on an option, they can pick one to refine the results further.
I am very excited about age; I’ve wanted to help find books for my 6-year-old for a while.
Aiming for a late April launch, but I’ll know more next week.
What worries do you have right now?
I need to 3x our traffic this year so that we reach break-even on costs and can keep adding new features at the same pace (or faster).
As mentioned a few weeks ago, Google rolled out a significant update, which hit us hard. Our traffic from Google is down about 20% (which I didn’t expect). That is normal and part of the process for a new website, but also frustrating. Things will improve as we age, add new features, and more. But I would prefer a straight line of growth, of course.
What is going on outside of Shepherd?
Being sick and otherwise enjoying sunny weather on a little trip for my son’s spring break. We are in Spain and loving life.
What am I reading?
Savage Peace - I love this book! Hoping to finish it soon.
A Discovery of Witches - I love this series and am currently on book 2.
Thanks, Ben
P.S. No picture this week; too sick.