Dallas Hudgens' Website
If you’re an author, you know that there are times for writing and there are times for getting out to promote your writing. Those times don’t always coincide. What happens when your readers go to find you on the Web when you’re working on the next book?
There’s nothing
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by Bud Parr on March 03, 2009 | permanent link
Dallas Hudgens' Website
If you’re an author, you know that there are times for writing and there are times for getting out to promote your writing. Those times don’t always coincide. What happens when your readers go to find you on the Web when you’re working on the next book?
There’s nothing worse than a Web page with nothing but whitespace; no one likes to waste their precious click only to find “No events here, check back later.” Bad.
Dealing with a lot of authors we’ve figured out some ways to manage this. First, we create events sections to automatically show future events only. You don’t have to go back in and clean up old events so you don’t have to worry about your Web page showing that you last gave a reading when the Berlin Wall was still standing.
For those with a lot of events we do display past events when there are none in the future, but these are shown as an orderly archive. That helps by showing activity and setting up expectations for something to come. For some we combine news and events so when events disappear there’s news on the page.
But what if you’re spending most of your time writing right now? Dallas Hudgens is a writer with two novels to his credit. He had a blog once but really wanted to spend his time writing fiction. We created a site for him to showcase his books and the great reviews they received and even though he’s not out doing events right now, we wanted the site prepared, so we created places for news, events and other writing.
Fine, but what to do with those sections when they’re not being used? We hid them!
We told the code to say “if there are no future events hide the events page and the menu item leading to it.” If you’re technically inclined you know that this could cause problems with search engines, but we managed that by telling the code to say “if there’s no content on this page then tell the search engines that this page doesn’t exist.”
When there are events or news, they show up (in Dallas’s case both in the menu and in the about section) and you don’t have to do anything.
Click on the image above to see a screenshot of the front page of Dallas’s site if he currently had events and then visit his site to see what it looks like now. This may not be the solution for everyone, but we feel it works here. For every author we consider their individual situation and build the site based on a strategy for them. We also work closely with publicists when appropriate to make sure that the site fits with their strategy too.
Got ideas for the perfect author Website? Share them because we’re continually working to build sites that help your audience find you and help you not to worry about your Website.
I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.
As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the
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by Bud Parr on May 06, 2008 | permanent link
I keep up religiously with the guru of Web usability, Jakob Nielsen and while his work is mostly of interest to professionals, he often publishes tidbits good for anyone in the process of getting their site up and running.
As a Web designer/developer the biggest issues I face are the constraints of speed and space, which essentially come down to thinking about the variety of audience that my site might encounter. Here are some notes from Nielsen’s latest newsletter that speak to those constraints:
Two interesting observations from WebSiteOptimization:
(1) Over the last 5 years, the average Web page grew from 94 KB to 312 KB: a growth rate of 82%/year.
(2) Despite this obesity epidemic, observed response times for U.S. users with broadband decreased from 2.8 to 2.3 seconds per page (average across 40 big business sites) from 2006 to 2008.
My comments:
(a) First, let’s remember that almost half of the Internet users still don’t have broadband, particularly in rural areas. In fact, FarmersOnly.com explicitly decided to design for dial-up access.
(b) While 2.3 seconds is better than 2.8, it’s still 130% slower than the 1.0 seconds required for optimal user experience and a true sense of flow while navigating.
(c) In the past, big images were the largest offender, but now response times are delayed by the inclusion of ever-more external objects, code snippets, and “widgets.” Keep a lid on it. The biggest contributor to interactivity is still the ability to navigate fast and furiously.
The bold formatting is mine because I think those two points are worth keeping in mind. I often separate navigation as an entirely separate design process. Findability is everything on the Web and that’s not just search engine optimization, but how people find what you want them to on your site.
