Let's address the elephant in the room. Ahh yes, The Coffee Table Book has 2 websites.
The Coffee Table Book does have 2 websites live. And here’s why:
The Coffee Table Book Albums (old website)
One of the websites is our old site https://thecoffeetablebookALBUMS.com/.
We keep this website active because it still ranks on Google (and we love being on Google, especially page 1 because that is one way in how our customers ie. people like you, find us).
Also, the old Coffee Table Book online shop is still connected to that website, which we need to refer to once in a while, so we need to keep it active. However the shop portion on the old site should redirect to our current shop over on the new/current website https://thecoffeetablebookAUSTRALIA.com/.
The Coffee Table Book Australia (new website)
The new website can be found at https://thecoffeetablebookaustralia.com/.
One reason for the new website being launched on a new domain was that, Flothemes who we used for our old website’s theme (the pretty front end of the website) sold the business and the new owners of Flothemes weren’t going to be supporting the technology going forward. As you can imagine, sending Flothemes customers into a frenzy — but what was wonderful to witness was the community in forums coming together and suggesting alternative platforms which helped us decide which platform to go with going forward to avoid this happening in future. At least Flothemes did give their customers 12 months notice.
With no support for the Flothemes themes, we were at risk of the website crashing and without a website and online shop the business could have also been at risk of going down the gurgler (thankfully neither of those have happened.. haha).
We can now tell you 2 years on, the Flothemes theme still works just fine. We certainly didn’t rush into building a new website. For one, we absolutely loved the design of our old website. We were so attached to the aesthetics of the old site and had put many many hours into developing it, making it hard to say goodbye too. Another reason why we still have two websites.. haha.
We had to build a new website from scratch and so as to not effect ongoing business, and while we also learnt a new platform, we developed the new website on a new domain, but with a very similar address. The new website allowed us to upgrade old technology and merge our website and shop together into the one website.
The new/main/current website (the site has been live for the better part of a year so it doesn’t feel so new to us anymore) can be found at https://thecoffeetablebookAUSTRALIA.com/.
We decided we better address the elephant in the room when a customer raised the two websites question, and wondered how many others might have had questions on the same topic.
Here at The Coffee Table Book we just want to be transparent why we have 2 active websites. At the end of the day, they both answer your product questions as the content is the same, except where we have added new products and designs, only appears on the newer website. Any links to the old shop should redirect you to the newer shop with all the current product lines and pricing.
If you do have any questions, please feel free to reach out to us through our social channels or shoot an email using our contact form.
