Imagine the best stories read aloud to you by your favourite storytellers – well that's Story Box Library! Story Box Library gets kids excited about reading, inspires their imaginations and lets them have fun with stories, improving their language and literacy skills along the way. With an ever-growing library, suitable for preschool and primary aged children, it really is Storytime, Anytime!
Background
If you are an educator, librarian or the parent of primary school-aged children, you’ve probably heard of Story Box Library. Their website is a popular and fun resource used by schools, libraries and families across Australia to celebrate and encourage a love of reading.
The Story Box Library website is brimming with a database of stories read aloud by Australian authors, actors, comedians, celebrities, and musicians. Their tagline ‘our favourite stories read by our favourite storytellers’ says it all.
Story Box Library first approached Digital Bridge in their search for a digital partner to provide a few tune-ups to optimise their site and better serve their growing userbase. We were initially tasked with updating, managing, and making ad-hoc changes based on user needs, but the long-term goal was to eventually rebuild the site.
As with any popular or large website, the site needed to grow and adapt to the constantly changing needs of its users and developing technology. In particular, improvements to network capabilities were required to accommodate heavy user loads during peak periods, for example during mornings and afternoons when many schools across the country were accessing the site at the same time.
Methods
We began by carrying out some smaller managment tasks to improve usability and add key features to the existing Story Box Library website. Once these immediate updates were addressed, we tackled the large job of rebuilding the website to give it a fresh new look, improve user experience and ensure the hosting environment could handle varying and often very large volumes of visitors.
Some of the main changes planned for the website were:
- Create a single login page for all users to replace different logins for home, school, or library users.
- Make substantial changes to the presentation of playlists to make it easier to navigate through stories and browse different books, authors and storytellers.
- Improve website design to make it more appealing while following company brand and identity; add prominent calls to action.
- Improve network capability via a network that automatically scales when a heavy user load is detected.
- Ability to play stories from anywhere on the website via a 'Quick View' function.
- Improve browser / mobile and device support.
- Create an appealing blog experience with categories, top posts, and search functionality.
- Simplify subscription and payment processes.
Results
The new Story Box Library website has a vibrant, fun and energetic new look. The redesign has attracted a lot of positive feedback from users and administrators of the site alike, with some notable results:
- Simplified sign-in process
- Option to have subtitles play on videos by default
- Personalised homepages for subscribers featuring your most recently watched story
- Integration of the Storybox blog
- Improved playlist function
We’re proud to have worked with this incredible brand to create a new and improved website that looks amazing and will suit their needs as they continue to grow and reach more young readers.
Digital Bridge provides software engineering, website design, website development and website management services to businesses in Melbourne and throughout Australia.
If you're looking for a digital partner with innovative ideas on how to best update or redesign your website, get in touch. We'd love to hear about your project.
