ESco launches website for Aquila magazine

Article by Megan Walden

Mon 03 Oct 2022

We are pleased to announce the completion of a recent website project for our client, Aquila.

Aquila is the sole publication of the family-run, independent publishing house, New Leaf Publishing, situated in the coastal town of Eastbourne. The title was established in 1993 and is targeted at curious minds from the ages of eight through to thirteen years old.

This project comes from a fantastic partnership that we have built with our friends at New Leaf Publishing since we began despatching their back issues and first subscription issues in September 2021.

It all started with a brief for a fun, engaging, and easy to use website, to reflect the publication’s focus –to bring fun to science, history and general knowledge through absorbing articles and beautiful illustrations in every monthly issue. Our team spent some time working with the designers at Aquila to deliver a bright, colourful and yet practical design, using their distinguishable house style.

The aim was to develop a new website platform to meet the clients’ immediate requirements of facilitating a more efficient and streamlined eCommerce platform with a design that better reflects the brand. It was also important to ensure that the platform can scale and grow as the client explores new revenue opportunities in the future. And so, we did just that.

During the process of building the new website, our team migrated content across from the old site and built brand new sections including the shop, a link through to a blog hosted by the Aquila team, awesome activities for young readers, reader letters, videos, and links to even more ways for readers to interact with the Aquila brand.

The new website also has integrations with third parties for additional functionality including Klaviyo, Facebook, Google Analytics and a CDN. This was put through a thorough security and PCI compliance test and audit to ensure that everything was working as expected before going live. Once the site was ready to go live, our team travelled to the Aquila offices in Eastbourne to provide training to the team using it.

It was a pleasure to bring this project to life for our client, building a website that delivers a slick and efficient eCommerce solution, and integrates directly with their CRM system, reducing the amount of admin required from the team at Aquila.

You can read more about the pick and pack work that we’ve been doing for Aquila, here.