The design of Rob’s website at SFWRITER.COM
by Rob - December 8th, 2008.Filed under: Uncategorized.
An email I received today said in part:
I’ve read several pages at your Web site. As a well-wisher and a Web programmer, I urge you to consider improving the colour and general design of the site. My kind are cheaper than a dime a dozen but if I can be of assistance, do let me know.
I get comments like that periodically (although I get far, far more praise for the site than I do complaints). My response:
Many thanks for the kind words. They’re very much appreciated!
I’ve looked at other authors’ websites, and rarely see one that I like, especially from an accessibility point of view.
I insist on having a site that resizes well to any size screen (including those on mobile devices); that uses actual text, not graphics, for all words (so they can be resized and so that screen-reading software used by the blind will have no trouble with them); that doesn’t constrain text sizes or hard-code specific point sizes (so that the user can resize up as much as he or she wishes); and that does not use frames, which I find awkward and clumsy.
The choice of colours is personal, I grant you, but I’m genuinely curious about what general sort of changes you’d suggest given the above constraints.
Now, yes, some have said there are too many words on my web pages, but given that my site’s purpose is to drive sales of books that are each around 100,000 words long, it seems that catering to those who don’t wish to read very much text would be counterproductive. :)
By the standards of SF author websites, mine excels in terms of depth of content (with over one million words and over 500 pages) and certainly is in the top half in terms of layout and design.
Also, I actually enjoy coding my own site; it’s all hand-coded in HTML. I’ve been doing it since 1995, and I make several changes each week to the site (often small things, but I need to be able to maintain it myself to do that). So, I’m not looking to hire someone to do it for me. But I’m always open for suggestions as to how to make it better.
And I certainly do welcome suggestions. I’ll probably give the site a facelift or a spruce-up over the next few months as we gear up for the release of Watch, my next novel. Thoughts?
The Robert J. Sawyer Web Site