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Helen Rappaport

Internationally bestselling author

The Challenge

Helen is a bestselling author, historian, Russianist and media consultant. The breadth of her work, and the measure of success she had achieved with her Romanov series was not reflected in the quality of her website.

She had a wealth of material of interest to readers that wasn’t accessible and she wanted to do more to engage with fans around the world.

“I needed a website which could showcase the various threads of my historical expertise and enable me to share the wealth of material I collect in the course of my research. Not all of it gets published and Faith came up with many inventive ways of exploiting my extensive archive on my website. ”
HELEN RAPPAPORT
 

The Solution

MAKING THE MOST OF THE MATERIAL

Helen’s had a fantastic range of material available for each of her four main areas of interest and we wanted to create a site architecture which maximised the traffic from Google Search. The home page was set up as a portal leading to a rich repository of material on each of the four topics. 

Each specialist area showcases the books and some of the television appearances, podcasts and radio shows in which Helen appears.  In addition, each area features a range of relevant articles all carefully optimised for the search engines. 

To utilise Helen’s unpublished material – intriguing snippets that didn’t make it into a book – we developed a new feature called Stories from the Footnotes of History which would form the basis of Helen’s newsletter. These articles appear on a dedicated page on the site, but also automatically appear on the relevent ‘area’ pages within the site. 

A UNIFYING LOOK

To draw the areas of Helen’s expertise into one look, we chose a rich imperial purple which worked well for both the Queen Victoria and Romanovs & Revolution themes. This main brand colour is used to create a unifying image treatment across the site.

A custom font further strengthens the brand adding style and elegance.

MAKING THE MOST OF THE RESOURCES
We wanted to draw the best of Helen’s media resources into one place (the ‘area’ page for each theme) to create the feel of a treasure chest of information  — to read, to watch and to listen to. Where media resources were not available online we hosted these in a fast-serving cloud service to ensure that the weight of material doesn’t slow the site down.
“Faith is one of the most creative, hard working and hands-on people I could have wished to work with. She is hugely generous with her time and really knows and understands how websites work and how to attract traffic to them.
She is always willing to go that extra mile to ensure that the website she designs is expertly tailored to the special skills and qualities of the client.”

QUESTIONS ABOUT A WEBSITE OR PROMOTING YOUR BOOKS?

LET’S TALK!

I’m Faith Tilleray. I’m here at my computer most days and welcome any contact from human beings – particularly the special kind who write books. 
Pick up the phone anytime during work hours.