Brandeis University Press

Brandeis University Press (BUP) was originally founded in 1971 as an imprint of the University Press of New England publishing consortium, but following the consortium’s disbanding in 2018, the organization was relaunched in 2019 as a separate publisher. Best known for books that focus on Jewish studies, BUP has recently begun to specialize in New England-specific titles, and in 2021 they secured the rights to the University Press of New England’s catalog of past publications.

In mid-2023, the BUP team approached me with a unique challenge—could I convert their existing template-driven (and largely inflexible) Web site, created to display real-time API data from their title management system, into a WordPress site incorporating a visual page builder? And could that site retrieve a complete set of title/author/subject data from their system’s API every 24 hours, store it in the WordPress database as custom post types and taxonomies for easier access, all the while maintaining the existing relationships between all the various elements?

The short answer to all that is “yes.” Following nearly six months of development, along with a ton of testing, refining and polishing along the way, the results were judged to be more than worth the effort by the team at BUP.

Since the rebuild, SEO has been vastly improved, with all site pages now fully editable via the Elementor page builder. Posting of new titles to social media actually works, and all manner of supplemental info like awards, video trailers, a table of contents, additional images and other features—none of these supported by their title management system—are easily added to any title directly in the WordPress admin.

More enhancements are on the way for 2024 and beyond, but even in its current form, this rebuilt and revitalized version of brandeisuniversitypress.com has all the makings of a real page-turner.