I don’t you about you all, but I have crushes on literary presses the way normal people have crushes on Christian Bale. I also fancy myself somewhat “web-saavy,” and by that I mean that I am more likely to buy things from companies with nice websites. For my Online Marketing class’s most recent assignment, I checked out some websites from the publishing biz (that’s lingo for “business,” BTDub), looking for sites that address the needs of their clientele effectively.
Now, if you’re a publishing house, you’re most likely trying to reach several audiences at once with your site. It’s tricky. In the last week we’ve been talking about our own dear Ooligan‘s website, and how it can best serve the needs of our very varied potential visitors. We’ve got our book buyers and dealers, our reviewers, our students, and our readers, not to mention prospective students, our authors, and our faculty. While there are a few places all of those needs overlap, there are many places that they don’t.
Websites should not be frustrating to navigate. A visitor should know, immediately whether they’re going to be able to find what they’re looking for. For that reason, Tin House’s website (shown above) really stands out to me. Like Ooligan, Tin House is aware that they’re going to get site traffic from all different directions, and they’ve set up their front page to put you on the right track from the start.
Also, check out the layout. Check out the color scheme. The whole thing says, “Yes, we are a respectable publication, with our muted tones and fancy-pants fonts, yet we are not curmudgeons. We hire web designers.” When you scroll over the house its little windows light up, which inspires confidence in their company. They hire competent web designers. Oooh, ahhh…
I was, frankly, hard pressed to find truly bad sites. I figured it’d be easy to find a real dud among the low-budget, indie presses, but for the most part their simple, low-key formats seemed perfect for their audience. The kind of people who read zines and small press books want a site on which to order hard-to-find titles, nothing more. Microcosm and Soft Skull are two good examples. To find a truly weird website, I had to turn to the big boys. Penguin Books, on the left, was a real disappointment. The layout, as you can see, reads like an AOL special section on weird health tips – videos, “top shelf” picks, crappy fonts, low-budget animated GIFs. Plus, the “author” section is not actually for authors; it’s about them. Who visits publisher websites to read about authors? Their “young readers” section is an absolute abomination at worst and an afterthought at best, especially after checking out Where The Bad Kids Go, a site we looked at in class. In conclusion, I guess it’s better to do better, less.
