Women's Literary Prize Website
A website built to carry one of the world's biggest celebrations of women's writing - and to stay rock-solid through the traffic peaks when the prize winners are announced.
| Client | Women's Prize Trust |
|---|---|
| UN SDGs | 04 Quality Education 05 Gender Equality 10 Reduced Inequalities |
| Impact | United Kingdom |
| Technologies | PHP |
01 Introduction
The Women's Prize Trust is a charity that exists to celebrate and champion women's voices in the world of books. It runs the Women's Prize for Fiction — now in its 30th year and one of the most prestigious literary awards in the world — alongside the Women's Prize for Non-Fiction and Discoveries, which supports early-career and unpublished writers. Across its work, the Trust has celebrated hundreds of female authors and built a reader community many millions strong.
The Trust needed a website worthy of that reputation: a home for women's voices that could showcase the prizes, host a vast and growing library of books, support a busy programme of articles, interviews, podcasts, and events, and sell merchandise — all while standing up to the intense public attention that comes with a major literary award.
02 The Project
We designed and built the Women's Prize website as a custom WordPress theme using ACF (Advanced Custom Fields), with WooCommerce powering the shop. The result brings everything the Trust does into one place: the prizes and their longlists, shortlists, and winners; an extensive, searchable library of titles; the Bookshelfie podcast and events programme; editorial content for readers and writers; and a merchandise store - all within a system the Trust's team can manage and update themselves.
What makes this project distinctive is what happens around the prize calendar. Each year builds to a series of major public moments - longlist, shortlist, and winner announcements for each prize - when national press coverage and reader interest arrive all at once. When a winner is announced, traffic can spike to around ten times a normal day. We don't just hand over a site and step back; we provide additional, hands-on support through these high-traffic periods, on call to make sure announcements go live cleanly and the site performs when it matters most.
The hosting we provide is built for exactly this. It stays stable and fast through the biggest peaks, so the moment a winner is revealed — the moment the Trust has worked all year towards - the website is ready for the surge rather than buckling under it.
That readiness was put to the test during a global Cloudflare outage. With the site's DNS deliberately set to a low TTL, we were able to react fast: standing up a temporary holding page and switching the DNS across to keep the Women's Prize online and informative while the wider internet disruption played out. It's the kind of fast, practical response that only comes from a team that knows the site intimately and is genuinely standing by.
The Women's Prize Trust home page welcomes visitors into a home for women's voices in literature, with a rotating hero carousel spotlighting the latest prize winners. Clear top-level navigation leads to the prizes, reader and writer resources, the library, events, and shop, with account, search, basket, and a prominent donate option always to hand.
The book library helps readers find their next read from the full collection of prize-listed titles. A keyword search sits alongside filters for genre, author, mood, prize year, and type, plus a toggle for Bookshelfie recommendations — with results displayed as a browsable grid of cover artwork.
A newsletter sign-up invites visitors to join the Trust's community of book lovers. It sets out clearly what members receive — weekly recommendations, event news, writing inspiration, and first-hand prize updates — with a simple name and email form, and a reassurance about how their information will be used.
03 Conclusion
The Women's Prize website gives the Trust a confident, capable home for its mission - one that handles a rich library of content and commerce day to day, and rises to the occasion when the world is watching. Dependable hosting, a system the team can run themselves, and real human support through every prize season mean the Trust can focus on celebrating women's writing, knowing the technology behind it will hold.