Monday Author Website: Caroline Tiger

In my aimless surfing, looking for good author websites, I've discovered a few interesting things.

First, there are a lot of "5 Elements Your Author Site Needs" pages out there, all with varying suggestions, and many without a real idea of the function / purpose of an author site.  In my technical writing classes, I repeat time after time:  know your audience and your purpose.  If you haven't identified these, you're going to waste a lot of time writing copy that's not going to get read or used the way you intended it to be read or used.

Second, there's not a lot of what I'd call "real" information out there for authors on website building.  Yes, authors know that they need to follow the rules of web design and the rules for writing copy for the web.  But no one really addresses the extra elements that author sites need and, if they do, they don't go into enough detail for my liking.  I want to know more, damn it!

Thirdly, and call me nit-picky if you will, there's often no rationale behind why element or concept x should be included in your site.  Personally, I want to know why something should be there, especially if I'm spending time and money to add it!

Anyway, enough blathering, and on to today's site.

Caroline Tiger's Web Site

This simple, easy-to-navigate site provides the reader with connections to Caroline's latest book and articles, gives a brief overview of who she is and what she does, and links to her three blogs.  At first glance I like the site, and can see why it ended up on one of the lists of "good author websites" I surfed through last week.

The layout is easily scanned, the links across the top of the page are simple and clear, and the page is not overly lengthy.  No scrolling is required on either my desktop computer or my iPad in vertical orientation, and only minimal scrolling is required on the iPad on horizontal orientation.

The information is clear and concise, and her "About" section gives an information-packed overview of who she is and what she does (and has done).

A closer look, however, reveals a few problems, none insurmountable, but a bit off-putting, just the same.  While I like the set-up of the home page (brief about section, recent book and blurb, and recent articles), the most problematic for me are the artifacts in the Welcome text, which can easily be edited out.  In addition, the font size shows up quite small on every computer/monitor/smartphone/tablet combination I've tried ... it doesn't seem like a big thing, but even little problems or irritants to a potential audience can result in that audience moving on to another site.

That being said, I quite like her "Books" section.  It's easy to see what she's written, there's an informative little blurb for the top three books, and she's included a small image of the cover.  I also like the mouse-over text for each image, which begins "Read more about book x."  I'd like to see the same type of blurb for the books in the "Other Books" section on this page, and I'd also like to know which of the books listed is the referent text for the Financial Post's comment, as this isn't information that's listed anywhere.

My only other quibble with Caroline's site is that it doesn't appear to have been updated recently, and neither have her blogs, which might make a reader move on to another site, if it seems that nothing much is happening at the moment.

Regardless, I like this site, and it's drawn me in enough that I'd probably go looking for her books the next time I'm in the library.