I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I thought I’d take a look at the website of one of my favorite authors, Earl Emerson. A real disappointment. He’s an incredible author, but his website is doing him a disservice.

Style:
My biggest problem with the style of the site is that it is both dated, and inappropriate for the author.

From the construction of the site, I think the dated nature of the site is caused by the fact that it has not been updated in quite some time. The web is an ever changing place, and a site that was cutting edge yesterday will be old hat tomorrow. The website is a 90′s retro looking site with a gray and blue color palette. While this may have been somewhat appropriate in the 90′s when it was probably designed, times have changed. It’s aged look makes it look out of date before you even check the content.

I think it’s an inappropriate style in that it doesn’t reflect the style of the author’s writing. None of his books would look good with a dust jacket in this style. I can see designing a site to reflect his latest book, or possible his latest series of books, but a site that doesn’t reflect any of them is a poor choice in my opinion.

The site’s style and color palette are also not very flattering to the cover images of Mr. Emerson’s books. The high quality design employed on Mr. Emerson’s book covers looks out of place when displayed on a site like this.

Structure:
The structure of the site is a little odd. While there is likely a reason for it, I’m not sure what that reason could be. It is, at it’s base, a table based layout. The table based layout is however, inside a series of frames. The only benefit of this frame system seems to be to allow the Emerson site to pull the pages from another site where they are hosted. This may be a cost cutting solution of some kind, but in this era of low cost hosting, I don’t really see the point.

The code used in these pages is dated and I’d be concerned that it would not accurately be displayed in all browsers. While it did load in both IE and Firefox, it had a tendency to stop part way through loading. This partial page display tendency was fairly annoying, as the navigation bar seemed to be the most likely not to load.

Content:
The content of the site consists mostly of schedules for book signings, and book summaries. While this is a valid site format for an author, it needs to be kept up to date. The book summary section of this site is not complete, and the book signing schedule is out of date.

The alternative to this type of content would be to focus on content that is not time specific. Removing the time specific content and focusing on book summaries for instance. They can be added over time, and never really go out of date.

What I would change:
This is another site that I would start over from the ground up. Some of the content is perfectly fine, but the site structure and design needs to be completely stripped out and replaced.

Since a new site structure is in order, I’d recommend, as I usually do, a completely CSS based layout. The benefit of CSS in this case is that it would easily allow for design changes and updates site-wide, while leaving the existing content in place. With this sort of structure the site could easily be stylistically changed with each new book.

I like the idea of having the book signings, new book premiers, and other appearance dates available. I would update this section into a more easily updated format. Including an RSS feed with section to let interested people know of updates would be a good addition as well.

The book summaries are a nice section too, it just needs to be finished. While it might be understandable to not have the newest book available, missing the older books isn’t. This section needs to be updated, and kept up to date.

The author’s bio section could also stand to be updated. Like the rest of the site, this section contains dated information. While it was perfectly appropriate when it was put up, it has become outdated since. I’d recommend that it either be updated regularly, or replaced with timeless style biography.

Summary:
This site suffers mostly from neglect. It has been designed to be updated frequently, but that’s not what’s happening. It needs to be redesigned, and kept up to date. The alternative is to take it down entirely. In my opinion, not having a website is a better solution than what is currently being used.

Trackposted to Outside the Beltway, Perri Nelson’s Website, Mark My Words, The Random Yak, Adam’s Blog, Big Dog’s Weblog, basil’s blog, DragonLady’s World, Shadowscope, Common Folk Using Common Sense, The Bullwinkle Blog, The Amboy Times, Conservative Cat, Pursuing Holiness, third world county, stikNstein… has no mercy, The Crazy Rants of Samantha Burns, Blue Star Chronicles, Pirate’s Cove, Constitution Matters, Planck’s Constant, The Pink Flamingo, Gulf Coast Hurricane Tracker, Dumb Ox Daily News, Right Voices, and Gone Hollywood, thanks to Linkfest Haven Deluxe.