A custom website in five business days
A family-run children's publisher needed a real website before an event that was already on the calendar. A comparable build usually takes six to eight weeks. We delivered theirs in five business days.
- Website design & build
- Brand direction
- Cover-art cleanup
- Custom title type
- Contact routing
- Business email
- Accessibility & mobile pass
- Client
- Thompson Tales Publishing
- Industry
- Independent children's book publishing
- Flagship property
- The Legend of the Thompson Goldbloods
- How they found us
- Referral from a past client, SweetSauce Printing
- Build time
- Five business days, Monday July 13 to Friday July 17, 2026
- Also included
- An extra page added mid-project and business email setup
- Live site
- thompsontalespublishing.com
Results at a glance
- Build time
- 5 days
- Mon Jul 13 → Fri Jul 17, 2026
- Typical for a comparable build
- 6–8 wks
- Discovery, a production queue and weekly reviews
- First email to finished site
- ~1 wk
- Fri Jul 10 → Fri Jul 17
- Revision turnaround
- Same day
- Every round of edits, live the day it came in
The challenge
Thompson Tales Publishing is a family business. Christine and Tom Thompson turned bedtime stories for their grandchildren into The Legend of the Thompson Goldbloods: a storybook set in Montana's gold country, with a coloring book, stage adaptations and more titles on the way.
The books were ready. The web presence wasn't. Christine called herself a website novice. She had a one-page starter site and a written plan for what the new one needed, and she had an event coming up where people would be scanning a QR code to find the books.
That event set the real constraint. A typical agency build runs six to eight weeks once you add discovery calls, a production queue and weekly review rounds. Thompson Tales didn't have six weeks.
Where they started
The original site was a single long page with no menu. The books, school programs, theatre adaptations, author bios, merchandise and contact details were all stacked in one scroll, with a generic "Shop Now" button at the top. It had the right information, but there was no clear path for a family, a teacher, a bookstore or a theatre to find what they came for. On a phone, the layout broke apart.
How it came together
From the first email to a finished site in one week. All dates are from the project's email thread.
Fri Jul 10
Referral
Kimberly at SweetSauce Printing, a past KIT client, made the introduction. Christine replied the same day.
Sat–Sun
Planning
Christine sent the full image library and brand material.
Mon Jul 13
Build starts
Access handed over and a thorough written spec in hand. Day one of the build.
Tue–Wed
Pages and polish
Pages, copy, brand options and cover-art cleanup, with every round of revisions turned around the same day.
Thu Jul 16
New look approved
A new Goldbloods title font and a round of Stories page edits went live the same day they were asked for.
Fri Jul 17
Done
Mobile polish and final tasks. On track for the event.
Why it was fast
Speed came from how the project ran, not from cutting corners.
Everything was in hand on day one
Christine's written plan and image library meant there was no discovery phase to wait through. We could start building on Monday.
No telephone game
At a larger agency, client notes pass from an account manager to a designer to a developer. Here, the person reading the notes was the person writing the code.
Same-day revisions
Edits went live the day they came in, instead of waiting for a weekly review.
On Thursday, Christine sent a list of changes for the Stories page: a new title font pulled from the cover art, sharper covers, more gold dust in the background and a new headline. They were all live that afternoon.
What we built
1. A home for a growing collection
The site is built around The Legend of the Thompson Goldbloods and designed to grow as the collection does. It uses the deep navy, gold and cream from the book covers and a custom title treatment matched to the Goldbloods cover lettering.
The live homepage. The site currently includes:
- Home, with clear paths for families, educators, libraries and retailers
- Stories, the growing library of Thompson Tales
- The Goldbloods collection page, with the storybook, the coloring book and the editions coming next
- Our Story, introducing the founders and how the books began
- Books & Ordering, the page the event QR code points to
- Theatre, showcasing three stage adaptations of the Legend
- Partners, crediting the distributors, theatres and creative partners behind the books
- Contact, with topic-based routing
- Privacy & Terms and IP & Merchandise pages
Schools & Libraries and a News section with Tom's Journal and Christine's Sketchbook are set up for the next phase.
2. Cover art and brand direction
We cleaned up the cover art for the web, sharpening washed-out images so the covers look as rich on screen as they do in print. We also gave the family a few brand directions to choose from before settling on the final look.
The Goldbloods collection page, with its custom title lettering. 3. A Books & Ordering page that sorts buyers for you
The QR code at the event points here, so this page had to work for everyone who scanned it. Instead of a single "buy" button, it gives each kind of buyer a direct path: readers to Amazon, retailers and wholesale buyers to Ingram, schools and libraries to a request form, and event organizers to a direct contact.
4. One contact form, routed to the right inbox
We also set up business email on the Thompson Tales domain. The contact form ties into it: visitors choose a topic (general contact, orders, theatre, Christine, Tom or press) and the message goes to the right person. No email addresses are published on the site, so there's nothing for spam bots to scrape.
5. Accessibility and mobile
People at the event would be scanning a QR code on their phones, so mobile wasn't an afterthought. Every page got a mobile pass with readable type, buttons that are easy to tap and menus that work one-handed. The whole site also got an accessibility review before launch.
The results
- Live in five business days, in time for the family's event.
- About one week from first email to finished site, against a six-to-eight-week norm.
- More than the original scope, including a page added mid-project and business email setup.
- Same-day turnaround on every round of edits.
- A site that can grow. New sections slot into the same design as the Goldbloods collection expands.
- A client who asked to give us credit. Christine asked us to add our name to the footer and the Partners page.
What came next
The website was the first project. Thompson Tales later came back for a full Shopify store for posters, candles and apparel, wholesale pricing for retailers and theatre performance licenses.
Read how we built Thompson Tales a single Shopify store for retail, wholesale and theatre licensing.
Thompson Tales: the Shopify storeTools and platforms
- Custom-coded site (Next.js)
- GitHub
- Vercel
- Zoho Mail
Need a site before your deadline?
If you have a launch, an event or a season coming up and the usual six-to-eight-week timeline doesn't work, let's talk.