Digital Beacon: ecommerce website for a digital publisher

Digital Beacon publishes practical guides, workbooks and editable templates for UK sole traders and owner-run businesses. Its old website did not tell anyone that. It opened on a stock photograph of library shelves and promised a “vast and growing digital library” with “flexible membership plans”, so it looked like any other download site and had no publishing identity of its own.

It could not sell, either. The shop page and the product pages all carried the same notice, that the store would be launching soon, so there was nothing to browse, nothing to preview and nothing to buy. The job was to start again: a distinctive publishing brand, a clear offer, and a complete shop that could trade from its first day.

Same name, same address, a different business on the screen. The old homepage led with a photograph that could belong to any library and a pitch for memberships. The new one leads with the products themselves: three editions standing in studio light on a cobalt ground, the offer in one line, and the starting price, the Look Inside promise and instant download all in the first screen.

The work started with positioning, not pixels. Digital Beacon became a small press for practical work: every edition does one job, such as answering reviews, planning cash or getting found on Google, it is written for UK businesses, and it is bought once, with no subscription. That idea now runs through the whole site, from the first headline to the checkout.

Then the identity: a roundel logo, an editorial type system, a cobalt house colour and a colour of its own for each series. Underneath is a custom WordPress and WooCommerce build: a bespoke theme for the shop and a publishing plugin that serves the Look Inside previews and keeps the preview pages and paid files out of public reach. New titles drop into the existing series, and a new subject is simply a new colour, so the catalogue can grow without a redesign.

Every book on the site is shown the way a good publisher would photograph it. The editions stand against muted studio backdrops with a soft fall from wall to floor, lit by window light from the upper left, and they are drawn with real thickness: spines, page edges and a contact shadow where they meet the floor. They read as objects you could pick up, not flat thumbnails, and the same treatment carries from the homepage to the catalogue to each title’s own page.

The type is editorial. Titles and headings are set in Libre Caslon Display, large and quiet, with Manrope for prices, facts and buttons. Each cover carries its series, an edition number such as DB-01, the format and the page count, the way a publisher’s list would.

Every title belongs to one of five series, and every series has its own colour: cobalt for running a business, red for money and pricing, green for customers and marketing, ochre for work and focus, and purple for making and launching. The colour is on the spine and the cover, and the site uses it as you browse.

On the homepage, all thirty spines stand on one shelf. Hover over a spine, or move along the shelf with the arrow keys, and that book slides forward, swings its cover out, and the whole stage behind it changes to its series colour, with the title, the price and an Open the edition button beneath. In the catalogue, choosing a series turns the page header the same colour.

Discovery. The catalogue can be browsed as a shelf or as a list, filtered by series, sorted and searched. Each title page says plainly what you get: the page count, the number of files, the formats, the licence and the price in pounds.

Look Inside. Every one of the thirty editions has a Look Inside preview: a real excerpt, typeset exactly as it is in the download, in a reader that turns the page on a desktop and shows one page at a time on a phone, with zoom, keyboard controls and a read-as-text view. The pages are watermarked images served by the publishing plugin, so the paid files themselves are never exposed.

Purchasing. The basket and checkout are branded to match the shop. Checkout is two short steps, your details and payment, with the order summary beside the form, a place for a discount code, the choice of a guest checkout or an account, and a plain note of what happens after you pay.

Secure downloads. Files are ready the moment payment goes through. The links arrive by email, and every purchase is kept in the customer’s account library to download again. Downloads are served through the shop to the buyer only, never from a public address: the folders that hold the paid files refuse direct requests.

Most people will meet Digital Beacon on a phone, so the phone layout is designed in its own right, not shrunk. The cobalt first screen keeps the fanned books and both buttons in view. The shelf becomes a row of covers you swipe through, and each title page keeps the book, the price and a full-width Add to basket button within reach of a thumb.

Digital Beacon launches as a complete shop that can trade: thirty editions in five series, priced from £12 to £24, and a five-title collection at £79. Every edition has a Look Inside preview, and the shop has a basket, a branded checkout, instant downloads and an account library.

Lighthouse on the finished build, measured on its pre-launch address on 27 October 2026: accessibility 100 on the homepage, the catalogue and a title page, on both the phone and desktop tests, and desktop performance of 99, 100 and 99 on those three pages. The same day, the folders holding paid files and backups refused direct requests.

There are no sales figures here, because the shop is brand new. Visit Digital Beacon and take a look inside a title. For another shop built around its products, see Dene & Dune, or read how SR7 approaches ecommerce web design.