REB #3: “Fiction is the truth inside the lie.”

– Stephen King

Well, I’m still not sure if it’s more productive or not to find things we dislike rather than like, but here’s what I do know: I love Stephen King’s website.

It’s the polar opposite of Stephenie Meyer’s, in both content and design. Stephen King (Stephenie, Stephen—interesting coincidence there, eh?) has not only produced a much vaster (and far superior) body of work but has also managed to hire an excellent web designer and team of professionals to help him. Just look at his latest book cover (see picture above)! It’s so smooth and sexy, yet simple, which also happens to be a perfect description of his website.

The layout of the home page (and the entire site, in fact) is crisp, symmetrical, and has great contrast. A Flash slideshow at the top of the page announces King’s latest endeavors and books, while a tabbed menu runs along the top to navigate from page to page. When necessary (on subsequent pages), a well-implemented vertical menu appears to the left, unlike the plain, ugly, looks-like-a-mistake vertical menu of Meyer’s website. Text is sometimes divided into two columns—e.g., in order to separate news updates from product/book releases (on the home page), showcase certain multimedia items as distinct from multimedia news (on the Multimedia page), and minimize scrolling (on the FAQ page). Likewise, text and pictures are divided into two invisible but distinct columns (on the Misc. page), providing a crisp and beautiful but small separating line that announces close association between picture and text while still providing a little distance. Finally, while the website does use Arial, it does not do so exclusively, as the large section headers as well as the top matter (tabbed menu, etc.) are set in seriffed fonts like Times New Roman, to provide a little contrast and, therefore, separate the different elements of the page.

As far as content goes, King has taken great care to provide a wealth of information about his works and himself. Whereas Meyer’s page looks almost amateurish and barren, King’s is sophisticated, full, and dark, and it matches his personality as well as those of his characters. It is essentially another extension of his work, adding to the dozens of movies, miniseries, electronic stories/books, and other projects based on King’s work. For instance, he is currently in the middle of a project wherein he invites readers to take photographs that have some connection to his body of work and send them in (e.g., King’s Cross station in London shares his name and, King jokes, there must be a Deschain Bakery and something like a “Welcome to Stephenville” sign that can be photographed, somewhere in the world). FYI, if you don’t know, Deschain is one of King’s memorable characters.

In short, this is the website of a great writer who has been around the block a time or two and who, most importantly, has a strong, established voice and style. King knows himself, his characters, and his readers, and his website reflects this knowledge. His fictional world is generally so real and truthful, so well-crafted, that the seam of the “lie”/myth/fantasy is barely noticeable; likewise, the structure and design of his website are both so fitting and proper that they do not hinder the reader’s online surfing experience.

Meyer could learn a thing or two (or fifty) from him.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.

REB #2: “I guess I just violated the treaty.”

– Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

I’m sorry to any Twilight fans, and actually, I swear this has nothing to do with the fact that Stephenie Meyer wrote those much-loved-but-much-hated books or that her name has a weird spelling (Steven-ee? Mee-er?), but I just don’t like her website. It’s unfortunate, but it’s not really her fault—unless she designed it.

I dislike her website because of its design inconsistencies and the butt-ugly “Click to order Bree Tanner” button on this page. Indeed, that page is probably the worst on the site. The lone book cover at the top, next to that ugly button, looks out of place; the mouseover does nothing for it. The iframe of Stephenie’s Amazon store has an unnecessary scroll bar. The “Choose a Book” section is segregated, not to mention redundant and clumsy (click the book title to see an ugly pop-up, featuring yet another picture of the book covers for each of her books; click the covers to buy them from Barnes & Noble, which, okay, is valid because it’s different than Amazon, but still…). Once you’ve got a book chosen and its pop-up opened, each one has a title—except the last one. Oh, and the first book? Yeah, that link goes to Amazon, not Barnes & Noble, and did I mention there’s no ugly pop-up for this one?

Inconsistency personified.

Moving on, I find that the horizontal and vertical menus on the site are fighting each other for attention, particularly because there isn’t a vertical menu on the home page, so that just looks awkward. Additionally, the background pictures at the top of the page are inconsistent from page to page (tab to tab). Furthermore, I think that the text lines of the pages with large chunks of text (e.g., the blog-styled home page, the bio page, etc.) are far too wide. The reader has to follow each line almost all the way across the computer screen (at least on my 15.4″ MacBook Pro), which is tedious, and it therefore discourages the reading process. I’d rather read War and Peace all the way through—in one sitting—than read each page of Stephenie Meyer’s website, or any of the pages.

The final straw is that, as per the site’s CSS file and my eyeballs, the site is set in Arial with Helvetica as a backup and the generic sans-serif specification as a fallback; I’d love to know what that generic sans-serif font would be and look like because these (Arial and Helvetica) are ugly fonts!

Is this too harsh? I’m wondering if it’s more fun or just more productive to highlight things we dislike/hate rather than things we do like. I suppose we’ll find out in the next blog, when I discuss a writer’s site that I actually like.

And again, I’m not saying this is Stephenie Meyer’s (or Twilight’s) fault, even though some might agree that I have every right to blame them just because the books exist and because Meyer is a terrible writer, from a line level (even my friends who are Twilight fans—you know who you are—agree).

No, I won’t go that far—not today.

*NOTE: This blog entry is syndicated from a blog I had to start for my Electronic Publishing class at U.B. this semester. I may or may not delete the extraneous blog when the class is over, but I thought I would at least give my readers the opportunity to read the contents of that blog indefinitely.