SITE NEEDS AND GOALS
Project Summary
This website gives a makeover to the website of a young adult fantasy author, Tamora Pierce. This site should showcase her work, listing and describing her numerous books. It also serves as an information site for upcoming book signings and other events, answers frequently asked questions, gives contact and background information for the author, and connects to her blog.
Audience Profile
For this website, the basic audience includes the author’s fans, bookstores, schools and libraries. A secondary audience might be the media. Therefore, the audience will be both young adults and adults. The typical user will want to find out what she has written, where she might be appearing, and what new books or ideas she might have. The user will want to find answers to their questions, so a good response to this website would be if they can find the information needed and feel satisfied. The website should be clear, bold, like the books she writes and the author herself, and be visually appealing while conveying huge amounts of information, because the author is very prolific with her words.
Communication Strategy
This author has a large following and lots to say. She doesn’t need to attract an audience as much as she needs to not turn them off by having a confusing website that is hard to read or that makes it difficult to find the information the user wants. Her current website clearly does not fulfill this requirement. A simple, but bold, logo could identify the author’s genre. The colors should be uniform and make use of simple visual elements so as not to compete with the overwhelming amount of information the site needs to convey through text. Because there will be a lot of text, the site needs to have flexibility so that it will be easy to add text and the page can stretch to the required length to contain the text. The navigation menu needs to be simplified to the most essential elements, and distracting visual and textual elements need to be eliminated.
Competitive Positioning
Competition will be all the other young adult fantasy authors in the world. This site will be clearly different from many author sites, because this author has so much to say and her fans will want to hear what is on her mind, what she is doing next. This author clearly wants to communicate and takes the time to do it. She just needs an effective tool, her website, to do that. At the moment she does not have it.