Troyes Mille Pages.
The site of the Grand Est resource centre for children’s literature: a WordPress theme cut by hand, school classes booking online, and a monthly letter that never leaves the dashboard.
Overview
Troyes Mille Pages is forty years old. It is the Grand Est resource centre for children’s literature: an association based in Troyes whose remit covers an entire region. Three missions, a children’s book festival, a writers’ residency, and mediation tools for school classes, who book their visit online.
They asked me for the site that goes with their new name. A WordPress theme written from scratch, Bootstrap 5.3.7 on board, Jost as a variable font. Live on 30 July 2026, checked and settled on 1 August, two months before the fortieth festival opens its doors.
- Client
- Troyes Mille Pages, Grand Est resource centre for children’s literature
- Brief
- A new site for a new name
- Year
- 2026
- Role
- Design, custom theme, newsletter, go-live
- Under the hood
- WordPress, Bootstrap 5.3.7, Jost variable, MailPoet and Mailjet
Forty years, a new name.
The name already does half the work.
Troyes Mille Pages: say it out loud and a French ear hears trois mille pages, three thousand pages. The town and the page count in the same breath. The name is new; the association used to be called Lecture et Loisirs, and its old site still carried that sign, over on lecture-loisirs.com. Changing your name at that age is not swapping a logo, it is moving a reputation.
The fortieth festival runs from 8 to 11 October 2026 at the Espace Argence, free entry. There is the opening, and the drawn and musical readings with children’s authors and illustrators. And there is the literary prize ceremony, held in front of the participating classes: the children are in the room when the prizes land. Those classes book online. Here, a page that works means one more class through the door.
The lead headline changes on every visit: growing stories, then blooming imaginations.
Cut from new cloth.
No off-the-shelf theme on a house like this.
I wrote the theme entirely by hand, no page builder: this identity deserved better than a template to fill in. The site serves audiences that never meet, a teacher preparing a visit, an author in residence, a journalist hunting for the press kit, and it has to absorb an edition that changes every autumn. So every template knows what to do when the material arrives, and the Facebook and Instagram feeds land on the home page. I ran the whole build remotely, over SFTP, with no shell and a disk quota counted to the last megabyte. The bench was narrow. It does not show on screen, and that is the point.
Screenshots of the live site, August 2026. The phone scrolls on its own.
Nobody to call.
One letter a month, and not one extra tool.
MailPoet composes the letter inside WordPress, Mailjet carries it, 441 subscribers get it once a month. The division of labour mattered more than the plumbing: whoever writes at the association writes where they publish their news, they do not switch screens, they have no second tool to learn. Nothing to export, nothing to retype. The site then left my preview server for the association’s own hosting, without a break, and it lives there without me. For an association, that is the only delivery that counts.
One sign-up block, one letter a month, and a phone number for those who would rather use their voice.
You do not judge an association’s website by its traffic. You judge it in October, when a class walks into the Espace Argence already knowing why they are there.
Workshop notebook, 1 August 2026
