If you’ve ever wanted to show off your involvement in NiaD, or had to explain to a significant other why you need to block out an entire day in October and stock up on easily consumed junk food, then you may have had cause to visit the Novel in a Day website.
Up until now, that’s been hosted as a subset of pigfender.com, in all its yellow, bloggy glory.
I say “up until now”, because we’ve now gone live with a brand new novelinaday.com site. It’s completely focused on NiaD and is 100% less yellow. But of course, it still has the monkey. It also contains lovely links to social media pages for the social media-y inclined.
Comments, feedback, suggestions* and off-topic ramblings always welcome!
(Oh, and feel free to continue to visit pigfender.com if you find yourself suffering from a yellow difficiency)
suggestions for book/writing themed days-of-the-week hashtags are especially welcome!!
Eg, #wordcountwednesday (but much better)
Nice to see! Of course, the best thing about the new site is the cup at the top which just self-inscribes when tapped.
Feedbackwise:
You did say you wanted feedback. How about altogether too much feedback? Did you want that too?
A)
I would suggest that superimposing title text on the book covers doesn’t work visually. It adds a bit of cacophony to an already graphically busy block. The covers already have their titles on them. I can see that you might want to display the NiaD number, since that is not on the covers, but for the reason above, I think I would seek a different way.
B)
[Update: So far, I have only checked out the site from my iPad. The comment below is a reaction to viewing the site in iPad landscape orientation. I think the current layout works better in portrait mode. The covers are bigger and one sees just two abreast, so the presentation is less busy and more sumptuous. And there is exploratory scrolling to be had!]
Another thing you might consider is whether this landing page might be more satisfying if one scrolled through panels devoted to the individual books – maybe just cover plus blurb plus NiaD number. This would be more paced/sedate than the cover chock-a-block you have now. Calm as a post-NiaD monkey. It would also make the landing page more linger-worthy, since there would be something to do right there – before clicking into the separate book pages and etc. (Current web design chic might also require that the covers appear alternately on the left and the right as one goes down. So, you’ll be in for a pound, if you go this route. Just saying.)
An alternative to the above would be to calm down the cover block by going back to the cover art and making display-simplified versions of the covers special for this pupose. Take the blat off SWP and the running text off the bottom of each cover.* This would reduce each to its graphic and typographic essentials and they would sit together in close proximity much better, I think.
Or maybe if each cover in the block o’ covers sat in a neutral rectabgle that gave it some margin from the other covers?
gr
“Raining on your parade since 1984.”
The bottom text could even be replaced by some stylistically uniform info text so long as it was very simple – the year, for example.
