Say hello to the new obooko website!
Posted by Tim Johnson
Our new-look free ebooks website is finally here! We hope you like the fresh, contemporary design.
The much-loved old site had been around for a few years and badly needed a revamp, not only to bring the design up-to-date, but also to ensure the backend coding works and responds better in web browsers on smaller screen sizes, especially on mobile devices.
Designed and developed in the UK, the new Obooko website is built to be quick, stable and secure on desktop computers, tablets or phones; so you can enjoy the same book-browsing experience wherever you are at any time of the day.
The site has been designed with You in mind and you’ll be glad to hear we listened to your feedback and have added a quite a few user-interface improvements, which include:
Your personal account page
Here, you can change your email address and password, pick up messages from the Team, and even close your account if you wish. We hope you never do of course, but the option is there.
Option to select category book views
This is one of the most requested features by our members and hopefully will make your ebook selection process a little easier. By selecting from the option menu top right of the standard book grid on any category page you can now also view:
- Latest books first
- Earlier book first
- Books in ePub format only
- Books in Kindle format only
- See books in a list view
Fiction and Non-Fiction menus separate
No more confusion, you can go straight to the menu of your choice and select the category you require.
Log in from any page
This should make your experience a lot better: the login form is now a pop-up overlay, so you no longer have to move to a separate page to log in.
What’s more, we have upgraded author accounts to include many more user-friendly features too.
Improving your page experience
In addition to a host of new features, we have made the site quicker to use, especially for browsing and downloading books. You may notice we have compressed the three ebook file-types, pdf, epub and kindle, in order to ensure shorter download times. And with speed in mind we have also optimised the site so that pages load faster on your device. With over 50% of our readers now using mobile phones to download our free ebooks, speed is paramount.
Google wants to make the Internet a user-friendly place and works hard to educate website owners about the benefits of user experience (UX). The Internet giant has now set standards that all sites must strive to meet by measuring these using their Page Experience and Core Web Vitals metrics, which measure the speed that layouts, images, videos and text are served to your device via web browsers. We were fortunate to have the pleasure of consulting with leading PageSpeed and Core Web Vitals expert, Arjen Karel, from Holland, who advised us on a wide range of page optimisation issues. You should check out his website to learn about the techniques he uses for improving site performance ... and take a look at his amazing Fastest Page on Earth, which achieves a consistent 100 points for both mobile and desktop page speed. You can't beat that!
Obooko is for YOU, so if you have any ideas or suggestions for further improvement please let us know via the Contact form
