What I did on my day off

[rolanni]

As threatened, I worked with my spiffy new layout program, which was remarkably soothing.  I’ve also made a start on a Carousel Tides website.  It’s not by any means done yet; I want to add a cast of characters, and some sample chapters and a post about why I wrote this book — to, yanno, defuse those folks who will ask Why On Earth I wasted my time writing urban fantasy.

If you have a couple moments, do you mind going over and taking a look at the place?  Let me know what you think, and what you might find useful in such a site.

Thanks — and I hope everyone had as relaxing a day as I did.

Originally published at Sharon Lee, Writer. You can comment here or there.

Comments

[hakuen]

It looks really good! Just one thing stuck out to me:

"Where the land meets the sea" looks fine, but "Carousel Tides" above it needs a smoother font, a more readable color (as bright as that red is, it's a little light, so it makes the eye boggle a bit trying to read it; it could do with either a font that has a black border around a slightly deeper shade of red type, or to not be done as type -- see next part of comment), or -- what I really think would be best -- it needs to be done up as a graphic instead of as type overlaid on an image. Or at least, it looks like that's what it is :) and that's great for now, but because of the font color and small jaggedness on the letters' edges, changing it to a graphic (whether done by you, or by one of the many talented amateurs who do very professional-looking headers and banners all the time for free in various livejournal communities, and only ask for credit) when you get more time might help a lot with the initial visual impression.

The planned content additions sound great, and are basically what I started looking for the minute I scrolled down! :D Any meta about the world and character or place background/details/origins that didn't make it into the book would be interesting and enjoyable to read about too, if you were so inclined to wax all meta about your writing sometime, or tell stories about the story. If that would create problems or something, of course, by all means disregard this.

I love the background and header images that you chose, and the layout style is very clean and nice.

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

I would agree with these comments. The red vibrates and is hard to read. Perhaps something like #660000 or #990000 (a couple of dark reds that might work) would be better. I thought it might be easiest to make specific suggestions in hex.

I will enjoy all the meta once you have time to add it.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I thought it might be easiest to make specific suggestions in hex.

Thank you!

[cailleuch.livejournal.com]

Glad it helped. I liked #990000 best as well.

[rolanni.livejournal.com]

I'm not getting the jaggies on my screen -- which I'm willing to believe is a deficiency on my end, not having a screen tuned for art, and old eyes, besides. My original idea had been to use the cover font -- but I couldn't reproduce it.

And, yeah, the red. It needs to not be all grey, but I'm not sure red is the answer...

. . .or tell stories about the story

As it happens, I have several stories about this story. . .

[hakuen]

The deeper red is much less eyestrain-y and the added content is great. Maybe sometime you can get someone to turn the cover into a good banner/header... (-edited because this sounded like false humility on re-read, I apologize.-)

Well, it sounds like it's probably my computer or some setting that I have going on. :) It does it on Firefox, IE, and Opera for me (widescreen laptop w/ Vista). As a side note, the site looks almost identical in Firefox and Opera, but the font size for "Carousel Tides" at the top is quite different between FF and IE (and nothing else, as far as I notice), which is interesting. o_0 IE, go figure.