I saw an author friend yesterday. She had a few interesting grumbles about her website, and although I would like to link to it, I suppose for discretion’s sake I had better not say who she is.
Her website looks beautiful, and at first she was very pleased with it, but now she’s beginning to see the limitations. First of all, the font is very tiny and almost illegible. The colours don’t help. The designer doesn’t want to make the letters any bigger because that would spoil his design. Secondly she gets hardly any traffic because although her book has been widely reviewed, and she speaks at all sorts of good meetings, there no real reason to link to her site. It just has a biography and a sample chapter which is hard to read. She would love more feedback from her readers, but she gets hardly any emails because the website is hard to find on Google, and in any case the contact details aren’t obvious. Finally she doesn’t have the FTP details, and even if she did, it isn’t based on a Content Management System, so she has to ask the designer every time she wants to update it.
I’ve heard many of these complaints before, and I would say they are pretty common. There’s only a limited use in having nice looking but lifeless website hanging out among the billions of pages on the web.
She told me that lots of bloggers had reviewed her book - and some had drummed up all sorts of political controversy about it often vehemently disagreeing with her. She had chosen to ignore them. Of course I immediately said that she should be politely replying on those blogs so that next time they mention her, they will know where to link. Of course if she had a blog herself, they would be even more likely to link to her, and she would build up Google ranking and traffic. If she was using WordPress she would have control over her site. And a blog designer would hopefully have legibility foremost in mind.
For websites, the most important questions are
- Can you find the content?
- Can you understand / read it?
- Is it interesting?
- Is it useful?
- Would you like to come back again to visit it?
- Might you like to link to it?
Is it beautiful? is of much less importance. Sorry designers.
2 Comments
This post hits the nail on the head! I’m trying to help out a friend who is in a somewhat similar position to your author-friend. My friend has to go around to his web designer’s house to get anything changed on his website! I’ve been looking into options and I see from your other posts that you are a fan of WordPress. I’ll be trying that out to help my friend.
I have made a note of your 6 points at the end (and your 7th).
P.S. You probably never go down to the bottom of your pages on this site, but I just did and there are some “missing links” down there.
Hi Adam
Thanks for you comment - and also for the head-up about missing links. Ironically, our own site is currently a bit of a shambles, but is about to undergo major overhaul.