Closed Circle. We don’t have everything up, but there is a hint of content. We haven’t got an actual ‘anything’ yet, but as Lynn says, you can go push buttons and kick the tires and provide whatever comments you like in whatever venue you like. Now you can see what Lynn’s been working on. Jane and I haven’t a clue about how to get onto the site’s inner workings yet, but we’ll talk to Lynn tonight and will get our info.
In the meanwhile, Jane has another of her cover slideshows up, and we’re just brimming over with fun things to look at.
There’ll be a lot of changes. In absence of actual real pieces, Lynn has loaded all the scraps and bits and bobs we had in the practice bucket. I’m pretty sure the font colors were a surprise: I wrote mine in all black and white, and had a couple of font size changes, and you can see what happened. So we’ll certainly be adjusting that!
Good points about aiming the links, and helpful information about what the eye was drawn to with what assumption.
Congratulations! Cannot wait for the “anythings”.
Control+ and control- worked well for changing the font size. Thanks for that hint. _s
I too clicked all over the page to get in via the splash page. I agree w/ many of Green Wyvern’s observations and recommendations.
(BTW, Cat_Staff, I love your avatar & name!)
Thank you — The avater is The Chat, very alpha feline, and the name is what we are!
The logo’s beautiful, but I definitely agree that the double splash-page is doubly annoying. Though interestingly, the page not found error with the wait-for-entry doesn’t happen for me any more, and back when you first put up the splash pages, it did.
What do the past, present, future links DO? they all seem to go to the same place, the foyer.
We come to the site to buy books. Please make it as easy as possible. As few layers of descent as you can manage. Put the books right out on the display table. Author info, essays, other goodies, those can be behind various links, but the books should be right on top. Methinks.
Echoing all on color. Make it black and legible.
Looking forward eagerly.
Oh, off topic — I lowered the resolution of my screen, to make the cards in a solitaire game bigger, and it totally messed up this blog. The sidebars stayed full-width and squoze the center main text into a tiny 2-inch wide column. Didn’t do that with Jane’s – the main text stayed full width and the sidebar got pushed off-screen a bit. So you should know that this template does NOT play well on a 1024 x 768 screen.
Weird.
Yep, I will write some commentary and ad copy over there, but I’m intending to lay books on the table as fast and as conspicuously as possible,then provide links back to the blog, in case anybody’s gotten over there without the knowledge of what exists over here, and to the website if they just want to rummage further.
I view the blog as where I visit often and write about things, but the CC site imho is like a store, where I hope to have things on display and conspicuous buttons to push to get them.
Lynn got to the splash page error and fixed it last night. Seems to be something buried in a backup file that keeps reconstituting itself no matter how often erased.
The credo to keep in the front brain when designing products to be used by the general public is KISS aka Keep It Simple Stupid. The fewer clicks the better. I spent a lot of my working life reviewing airline reservations screens for usability. Everything has got to be up front and immediately visible. Travel agents won’t scroll looking for something if they can help it. That’s why there were so many law suits filed to get rid of the bias in reservation systems. The owner had (has) a tendency to put their own products up first.
I would really like to see a pic and link to your latest release on the first screen that comes up when you go to your home page. Yes the logo is pretty but in the interest of grabbing the casual passer-by’s attention you need to highlight what’s new as quickly as possible.
Jane wrote:
“…appropriate for us, not some megacorp, (or a minicorp trying to pretend it’s a megacorp) … not with the same solutions as everyone else, the way we’d have if we farmed this out, but with our own.”
No, effective websites are NOT all the same, by any means. They can be totally different, as you will see if you look through the links I gave above. But there is a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge out there about good design principles, which you ignore at your peril.
If you farm it out, you would NOT get the same as everyone else. You would get what you wanted, but without having to deal with the technical issues yourself.
The typical method of doing it would be for you to design – in Photoshop or similar – what you want your website to look like, along with a description of how you want it to work (‘Press this button and you go to this page. This menu item slides out with the following sub-options. Purchase an item and you get this confirmation message afterwards. Etc.)
Then you give your design to a technical person who will turn it into a functioning website for you.
Typically there is some back and forth in this process, and the design gets tweaked a bit. But you end up with whatever you want. It’s like designing a house using an architect and builder.
If you want a Joomla website, you find somebody to create a Joomla website. If you want a CSS website you find somebody to create a CSS website. If you want a particular look or functionality, you design it and give it to somebody to create the way you want it.
When you have the website up and running, then you can certainly go in and make changes yourself, which is typically a lot quicker and easier then writing the whole thing from scratch on your own.
The first step should be to decide how you want the final website to look and work, and create your design in Photoshop. Then you can go about creating it or getting someone to create it for you.
I agree with everything you said.
I think I’ve got to take Lynn’s side in this, GreenWyvern. I’ve just seen too many trashy websites and run into too many unscrupulous consultants.
For an example of the former, go if you dare to the following website. If the cutesy page-turning schedule agrees with the month schedule, it’s a minor miracle. And are they paying ASCAP for using that music? I doubt it.
http://www.renaissance-danapoint.com/
The House of Mouse’s site is pretty messy, too.
One consultant I ran into needed to fix his system every so often. I happened to notice he did ctrl-something, and then didn’t seem to do anything for an hour: I looked at his code, and he just told the dBase II system to rebuild its indexes. In timesharing days, I rewrote a statistics program for a university professor. The timesharing company’s consultant’s program cost $1000 per run. My rewrite cost $10.
So, I’m with Lynn, though I agree about losing the red on blue.
Its only wise to understand as best as one is able the underlying structure, design and working content of one’s own web site–I think that is a granted. Nobody likes to be in the position of being at the mercy of other people to perform modifications and updates and repairs to something they have bought and paid for once already.
But really, there are hard-working honest designers and code writers out there. Believe me, they don’t want to be bugged for every little thing. They want to write code good, and create easy to manage and update web sites. And I guarantee you, should the Closed Circle decide to consult with a pro–it won’t be some random person picked out of an on-line directory or out of the phone book. Most likely, it will come as a personal connection, a hand-picked and vouched for referral from at least one, likely more, of the 500 people registered on this blog.
All they need do is ask and its done.
I design websites differently. (I’m not saying that your method doens’t work. It does. I just don’t feel it’s the best way to go about it, but then I’m coming to it from exhibition design where you move people through a physical space getting them to pick up information.)
– What do you want the website to do? Usually more than one thing. In this case maybe, ‘make it easy for fans to find their favorite books.’ ‘Intrigue people who like one author to explore the other two’ This is the thing that you need to make easiest for your users.
– What kind of users do you expect, and how do you expect them to behave? You cannot be all things to all people, and it’s better to have separate (sub)sites for separate functions. So a static website with great background information that won’t go out of fashion that people can and will find on web searches and link to; a blog for the always-new engaging content that keeps people coming back frequently but which they probably won’t link to a lot (‘today CJ talked about their breakfast’ just doens’t make linkable content, but people who already like CJ will come to read her post – but they will usually read the post in a feed reader rather than on the site itself), and last but not least, an e-commerce site that makes it easy to buy books. So you decide what you want and keep the separation – no blogging on the e-commerce site (instead use a widget to give a teaser of the author’s most current blog post.) The idea is to not duplicate content and to never send a user to two places to get one kind of content.
I then write the content and design the navigation around that. The graphical interface – the skin – then makes use of a theme or overall principle to tie it all together. I *like* traditional sites (and my own is very straightforward and not at all innovative, but it gets you to the things you need to see).
I agree completely with Katoji’s beautiful comments.
You are unusually fortunate in one special way. You have great resources to draw on which not many people have.
There are large numbers of people who have found delight and enjoyment in your books, who have learned things about human nature from them, who have seen something of themselves in your characters, or who have been able to lose themselves for a while in one of your magical worlds and forget their problems.
In one way or another many have gained something in their own lives from your writings.
So there are many hundreds of people whom you’ve never met, and perhaps never will meet, but who nevertheless care sincerely about you and wish you well, and who would be very happy to give something back and help in any way they can, if you give them half a chance.
Among these are some highly skilled experts in different fields. Experts who are not trying to sell you anything or take advantage of you, and who will give you impartial help and advice if you ask for it.
Perhaps there are also some fans who have less knowledge than they like to imagine, who have bad judgment, or are less competent, or have misguided good intentions.
So like Ari Emory, you have to decide who to trust. The first Ari didn’t trust anyone but herself. The second did find others to trust.
Don’t doubt that among your fans is a Sam and an Amy and a Maddy, and a Justin, and maybe even a prickly Jordan with his own issues who still has useful knowledge. If you want an Alpha Website built there are people out there who will build it for you.
GreenWyvern, I agree with many of your comments, and very useful they are, too. One thing to remember, I think, is that none of these ladies, especially Lynn, is new to this stuff. She was just learning a new way to go about it. Then too, they are letting the fans in at the very first and soliciting useful comment in order to fix and tweak. So we are not seeing anywhere near a finished product, just something that is not even in a beta test situation. Normally, no one sees a project this early. So I don’t believe Lynn should just toss everything and go get someone else to do it. It’s just going to take some time and some tweaking. My deepest apologies if I have misread your comments!
That said, I cordially detest splash pages. The less clicking around, the better! And a clean, efficient site is a must. I definitely think a shopping cart is a must, as I certainly intend buying more than one ebook at a time. Also, fans who have just discovered an author will generally buy more than one at a time as well, as opposed to those who have followed an author for a while and will faithfully buy each book as it is released.
I’m also not fond of a bunch of different colors on a site. Make it clean and use colors for emphasis, please, Lynn! If you’re feeling decorative, some artwork from any of the three of you would be delightful, rather than splashing color all over. I have a preference for white background with black text. As said before me, people will be spending time at your blogs and websites. This is a merchandise site to actually get the goodies, not a destination site. The simpler and easier, the better! Thanks!
On a related note: I just came across http://www.youtube.com/user/VideoJoomlaTutorials as a resource. I don’t know how useful they are, but I feel that there will be people here who might find them interesting.
I have to admit that it would never have occurred to me to look for a video tutorial. On the other hand, seeing the process how something done should suit my learning style, so maybe I need to join the youtube generation and leave the old static web behind, at least temporarily.
green_knight said, “I walk into bookstores and come out without things I want to read – that’s unheard of. And it’s making me rather mad. I want to go into a bookstore and find books I like!”
I’ve been having the same problem…I was starting to worry that there was something wrong with me. So it’s the publishing industry, eh? Whew!
It took me a long time to work out what was going on. And it doesn’t help that I sound, even to myself, like every other ‘nobody wants to buy my books, they don’t recognise my genius’ writer out there (other than that I recognise that my stuff has shortcomings).
Then I sat down and looked at the books that are in the stores, and how they differ from the books on my keeper shelves. The short answer is ‘considerably.’ (The long answer is on my blog.) The slightly longer answer is that yes, my tastes and those of agents and editors seem to be a bad fit. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t great books out there or that nobody writes the kind of books I like anymore – just that they are much more difficult to find.
I am also tremendously annoyed by ‘nobody wants to read’ pronouncements when the books thus designated to the eternal slushpile are things that sound great to me.
It’s how you know you’re doing good stuff, when you can look at the bookshelves and say: “I’m better than that.”
I won’t reveal the name of the luckless author who was my negative model, but when I got very down and discouraged, I would take this book off the shelf, read a passage at random, and say to myself, “He got into print. I can.”
Once I did make it, I gave that poor book an honorable burial.
I’m not optimist enough to think like that. I look at those books and think ‘how the hell does this get published and nobody has even shown an interest in my book? I can see why publishers would step back from the Diary – it’s too quirky, too much effort to edit, however much I love it, but the other book? Has its weaknesses and I’ve pulled it because I can write it better now; but it got no bites whatsofreakingever, and it can’t be THAT bad. It’s just, on close examination, very much not what people want to publish now, which means the bar hangs much higher.
Yep, it’s the industry. I wrote an extensive comment on it on the CC site, and that’s exactly what’s gone on.
Be patient with the red text until Lynn gets back from Dragoncon. She used it while she was working with a black screen and didn’t want to have disappearing text when she switched back; but she forgot to change it. I went in to see if the font/color toggle is on our side of the wall, but it isn’t, and Lynn advises us the other side of the wall is a place we should not venture without instruction, so I may take the expedient of doing the changes in my own word processor and uploading, which might be safer. I’ll see.
Maybe in part it’s also the booksellers’ fault for not stocking certain kinds of books and for not being able to point you to the right books.
Recently I went to buy a book as a birthday gift (yes, it was my fault for going on the last day), so I asked someone there for a straight, light to read book with some action, something in the vain of the more normal of the John Sinclair books. Obviously they didn’t have John Sinclair (and I still have to write down which ones I already gave), so she recommended two books before I stopped her and want on another search on my own. One of the books sounded like these twisty, intelligent thrillers, and the other was one these twisty, intelligent criminal stories, with lots of psychology and stuff.
In the end I took a step to the left and filched the Science Fiction/Fantasy shelf. Finally found a possible candidate so I had some miss-givings about the line space (not enough space between the lines) and the possible reading difficulty of the book. Going by the bookmark the reading is going slow, but the book has been picked up time and again, while the other book present is still lying untouched.
And the book in question is “Best of Lovecraft” …
(Next to it was an essay book about Lovecraft, going by the price given in an obsolete currency, it was there for the last ten years at least.)
One of these days I have to find out whether the book was a nice read.
I’m meant intellectual instead of intelligent.