What You Should Know About Web Design for Books
1. Link to where your book is for sale. Here are some of the things that you can choose from:
• Make a prominent BUY button
• Put an Amazon widget in the sidebar
• Put a buy page in the navigation bar
• Put a link in the footer
• Put a link in every page
You may snicker at this advice, thinking that it’s obvious. But trust me, people can get so consumed by the website design itself that they forget the very important fact that they are actually SELLING something.
Someone shared with me a link to a reportedly gorgeously illustrated children’s book, so I checked out the site. And, yes, the book was gorgeously illustrated and the story looked interesting. But I couldn’t find a way to buy the book!
I went through page after page and I still couldn’t find a way to buy the book. I then checked on Amazon, but no luck there either. I contacted the writer/illustrator/web designer and he sheepishly fixed this problem.
2. Remember, you’re trying to sell a book to people who have spent probably hundreds and hundreds of hours reading. And, whether these people know it, their minds have become wired for book reading.
A person reading a book starts at the left (assuming an English reader) and reads the line. The reader knows it’s the end of the line when the book binding is reached, and then the eye goes to the far left of the next line, etc. When designing a website, it’s important to take this book reading system into account.
A friend of mine recently redesigned his web site. His content was in the middle surrounded on both sides by blank space. Normally, I have no problem with this format. However, the text was in the middle of a single color background for the whole page.
Because everything was the same color my book-reading-wired brain read this as one unit. Therefore, I started on the far left, my eyes encountered blank space, continued through text, then encountered more blank space. My brain decided I was missing text and I got confused.
I contacted my friend about my problem, and he changed the text column background to a slightly different color than the surrounding blank space. Now my book-reading-wired brain only read the text as a unit and understood that the change of color was like a book binding – the signal of the end of a line of text.
3. As book readers, our brains work as “see text, read text.” This becomes a problem with a three-column web design where all three columns have text and are basically the same size column. The eyes start wandering around the page doing “see text, read text” and the brain gets confused.
Don’t use a web design where you put a far left column before your main content. As English readers we automatically read the left column first, thinking it’s the most important.
I use a web design where the main content begins on the left and there is a sidebar on the right. The size ratio is 2:1. Plus I don’t really have text in the sidebar. In the sidebar is where I put a blue-colored email optin box, an Amazon widget, and pictorial representatives of where to contact me.
A book reader sees the pictures and color and automatically files these as “pictures that I can get to after I read.” The web design I use does not fill the whole screen – there’s white space around the content. See my site http://www.millermosaicllc.com.
For an example of a web design that fills up the whole screen and yet enables a reader to easily read long articles, check out http://www.smashingmagazine.com, a free online design magazine with a site that is not in a magazine format. Instead, the far left main column is where the long article lives. The much smaller right column is where there are ads, recommended links, etc.
When designing a website for a book, it’s important to always remember that book readers with book-reading-wired brains are your audience. Think about how the site reads to a book reader. Will the web design confuse the reader’s brain? Is it clear what you want your visitor to read first?
And don’t forget you want site visitors to buy your book. So make sure it’s easy to do this!
Learn about our WordPress book author call-to-action websites now!
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Yes! You can use this article in your ezine, blog or website as long as you use the article in full and include the following resource box:
Yael K. Miller is a co-founder of www.MillerMosaicLLC.com, which combines traditional marketing principles with the power of Internet marketing strategies to promote your business more effectively.
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