Artistic Design and Publisher Website Aesthetics

Search Engine Love Is Blind but Title Rules

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.

Excerpt from Internet Book Marketing:

The well known architectural principle of "form follows function" is even better suited to websites than to buildings. The most beautiful website I've ever spent time exploring belongs to a well founded NYC based literary publisher. The graphics are stunning, the presentation is classy, and I'm sure every author with a book in their catalog has sent friends and family to view their bio page.The navigation is excellent, and the content is comprehensive in describing the mission and offerings of the press. They did so many things right that I have no doubt it required great effort and expense. The site is also invisible to search engines for all searches except the publisher name, which is fortunately the same as the domain name, or they would have been dependent on the kindness of strangers for proper linking to appear in the results. If it was your site, as an author, I can pretty much guarantee you that nobody would ever come. Invisible.

It's all wrong from the perspective of building a platform based on Internet search, because the site was constructed entirely in Flash, a rich multimedia presentation software that gives the designer total artistic control over the presentation. That control comes at a steep cost. In this case, all of the "text" on the site, the book descriptions, the company history, the author bios, even the navigation links, exist as images or as programming instructions, not as regular text. The result is that the search engines can't see any of the content on the site, or rather, they can't interpret what it's all about. I suspect this was more of an ommision than a design goal with the publisher, and assuming that Internet visibility isn't a core part of their business strategy, it's not hurting them badly. While the only visitors the site will get will be people who set out to go there, they'll get a good show when they arrive. Unless, of course, they don't have the latest version of Flash installed. In that case, they'll just see a message telling them to please download and install the latest version of Flash, it will only take a minute on a fast connection. It is possible to provide alternative text for search engines when using Flash, but the designers didn't bother, and in any case the search engines don't take it as gospel because it could all be a lie.

If somebody is funding you with millions of dollars to become an author, you can start by building a museum quality website if that's your fancy. If you're building you first website as an author, unpublished or published, aesthetics are an expensive luxury. When I say expensive, I'm refering to time more than to money. I've been a pied piper of establishing a web presence for years now, an essay I wrote describing the Internet as "The Path to Publication in the 21st Century" was even published in couple editions of Jeff Herman's Guide back around the turn of the millenia. So I've personally coached, and tried coaching, many writers and small businessmen through the process of establishing a web platform. It's a good thing I never charged for the service because my failure rate was embarrassingly high, it and always came down to the same thing. Authors who have never published before have this insane fear of making fools of themselves, when the insurmountable obstacle for most is finding somebody who is willing to pay attention long enough to laugh. Worrying about getting everything on your website just perfect before finding out whether or not anybody will ever come is plain dumb.

In the spirit of the fanaticism that's part and parcel with promoting a cause, I want to make clear that there's no room for compromise on the artistic issue! I've seen the endless pre-launch dithering sidetrack and destroy an author's chances of building web platform again and again. So while not exactly a compromise, I've come up with a two step plan for launching a website that will maximize the author's chance of success in actually creating a platform of value while allowing for aesthetics to play a role. I could break it into many more steps to reduce the complexity of the tasks, but I think the two step method is more likely to keep the author on the straight and narrow.

Step 1. Build a text based website, knock it out in simple two column format, links to the left, content to the right, and put it on the web, or pay a college kid some beer money to put it on the web for you. Then spend all the effort you can stomach getting links to the site, without which it's all a waste of time.

Step. 2. When you're getting a couple hundred visitors a day from the search engines, do whatever the hell you want with the website aesthetics, just don't change any of the page names, or remove any of the text.

The only real out-of-pocket cost to establish a website comes if you aren't willing to learn the basics of creating and publishing pages, and you end up paying somebody. I would encourage you very strongly to learn to do it yourself, even if you have to pay somebody to teach you Website design requires a knowledge of the written content, and as the writer, you're the pretty much the only one who will have that knowledge. But, if you do have to hire somebody, don't hire a professional website designer. Hire a student or a neighbor who has built their own simple website, and pay by the hour for closed-end tasks. A simple design like the page you are looking at now is the best way to start, feel free copy the layout. It's a table with two columns and two rows, my company logo is in the top row, left column, and the title and copyright management information are in the top row, right column. The navigation is in the bottom row, left column (along with repeated copyright information) and the main content, along with bottom navigation, is all in the bottom row right column. Here's the whole design in miniature, with the table cell borders shown:

Top Left - Logo Top Right - Title and Copyright

Bottom Left - Navigation, Contact and Copyright Bottom Right - Content and Bottom Navigation

A simple table form automatically resizes to fit within screen being used if there's enough content to stretch it out that far. It won't always look exactly the same on every computer, but who cares? This section of my website, the a half dozen pages with the navigation bars, titles, and space for the content, took less than a half hour to set up, It's just a question of creating the first simple page with all the navigation links, and than saving it under different page names. You may hear the word "template" in talking to web designers. That first page created serves as a template in this case, it doesn't need be any more complicated than that. After you have the collection of pages created, you just go to each one, edit the title, and start filling in the content in this bottom right table cell. Cutting and pasting from your word processor works fine. Once you have a simple template, you can actually create web pages in the WordPad program that's been part of Windows Accessories forever without learning HTML. When I feel like editing a web page from a computer other than my own, I just save it from the web, use WordPad to make the changes, and send it back.

"Internet Book Marketing: An Author's Guide To Building An Online Marketing Platform", instant eBook download now available as a printable PDF for $9.95.