A friend and mentor of mine in local East Bay politics took a look at the website for this book and told me it gave him the impression that the book was quite technical.
While the book deals with technology, it focuses squarely on people and how they interact and work together in groups to accomplish common goals. It’s about people and not wires and circuits and standards and protocols. It does discuss technology, though, and that’s one reason why there’s a glossary, but I write in plain English (as plain as I can make it, with my Irish heritage, that is) and I describe the ways groups of people are living together on the web by telling stories and anecdotes and by quoting interesting people.
This is not an engineering text!
So, a question for readers. What can I do to this website to make it seem more humane and less geeky?
Does this website make me look technical?
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4 responses to “Does this website make me look technical?”
Ask in the WELL photography or foto.ind conferences if anyone has a macro of a bee or a flower or both that you can use to place a small cheery but non-cliche image on the page.
What can you do to make it look lower tech?
1. Put a photo of your head on it in the banner. It’s by you (like blogs and books often are) so your face is a good indicator of this being personal.
1a. Bonus point: put your name in the banner. A site with a human face and a human name (“edited by…”) is approachable.
1b. Change “About the author” to “About Christian Crumlish” or “About Me”. Maybe Christian “Xian” Crumlish.
2. Lose the little icons across the top. Tres geek. I get the symbolism and the tie in to the book’s graphics, but it is over the top 1992 marketing using 1975 graphic design. Also, the multitude of colors is really distracting without adding any new information on the page.
2c. Why isn’t this “Crhistian Crumlish’s fabulous best seller TPOM ”
3. Lose the black. Find a bright, colorful, warm background color.
4. Experiment with a serif font for your headlines. They are more classic and trusted than sans faces. And just as readable at larger font sizes.
5. Think hard about an alternative to the work “wiki”. You need self-evident anchor tags, perhaps “community web pages” or “our group site” or “write and edit our shared pages”. Anything.
Your grey boxes on the left are in varying widths. There is comfort in having them all the same width.
First off: Phil Wolff rocks.
But also: our blog entries do lean toward the geek side of the living web. Part of that reflects the nature of blogs; we mirror a lot of metablogging items. But part of it is laziness; it’s easier to report on the latest YASNS silliness or tech innovation than to dig up a personal-interest story that might happen to have a two-way-web angle.
It’s good to tweak the design so it’s friendly. It’s also good to be on the lookout for the content getting too far away from the personal.
Points well taken, Pete.
Excellent suggestions, Phil.
So far I’ve already adopted a few of them:
1. Put a photo of your head on it in the banner. It’s by you (like blogs and books often are) so your face is a good indicator of this being personal.
Not sure I want my face up there, or how to make it work, but I’ve asked a designer to consider an overall facelift for the site, so we’ll see about that.
1a. Bonus point: put your name in the banner. A site with a human face and a human name (“edited by…”) is approachable.
OK. I added my name to the subtitle of the website so it’s in the title bar. Not sure how to work it into the banner.
1b. Change “About the author” to “About Christian Crumlish” or “About Me”. Maybe Christian “Xian” Crumlish.
Made it “About me (Christian Crumlish)” – I think anything starting with x is going to seem geeky to people. Pete just stared at me when I suggested using xian as my byline for the book.
2. Lose the little icons across the top. Tres geek. I get the symbolism and the tie in to the book’s graphics, but it is over the top 1992 marketing using 1975 graphic design. Also, the multitude of colors is really distracting without adding any new information on the page.
Removed. Now it seems a little thin, so I may want to widen the black bit there.
2c. Why isn’t this “Crhistian Crumlish’s fabulous best seller TPOM “
In the title bar? Nice idea… Should I wait till it’s a proven bestseller?
3. Lose the black. Find a bright, colorful, warm background color.
I’ll work on that, although we’ll have to change the color of the text graphic to match….
In the meantime I’ve made the boxes and blockquotes light blue instead of gray.
4. Experiment with a serif font for your headlines. They are more classic and trusted than sans faces. And just as readable at larger font sizes.
Yeah, and they needed to be larger. I think I’ve improved that a bit by going to a large unbold Verdana for headlines and main nav links, and making the running text Georgia and larger.
5. Think hard about an alternative to the work “wiki”. You need self-evident anchor tags, perhaps “community web pages” or “our group site” or “write and edit our shared pages”. Anything.
Yes, agreed on that. In fact, I think it doesn’t make sense to send people to the wiki. Instead, some of the pages just are wiki pages and people can edit them if they notice. I do draw attention to the blog, though.
Your grey boxes on the left are in varying widths. There is comfort in having them all the same width.
Fixed that in the templates. That was bugging me too. I think the spacing around the boxes may be a bit narrow now, though…