Concept and Overview
Library Files is a website dedicated to posting book reviews and recommendations, doubled with the purpose of urging individuals to expand upon their literary reading ground by providing a personal perspective from my own past, current, and future literary background. It focuses primarily on children’s books, specifically those designed to target children between the years 8 to 16, with emphasis on books that are designed for the fantasy genre.
However, the site isn’t specifically designed with these kids from this age bracket in mind, rather the parents and guardians of these children, in order to recommend to them what their kids should read and when the optimal time to start reading it.
My website is not unique in terms of my motivating factor (my desire to share the books I’ve read) and my purpose of founding a website on this motivating factor (a platform to share this desire). What makes my website unique is my personal perspective, my rating factor that I give the books, that deem them worthy of being read. Though I have no official credentials, my experience as a ‘bookworm’, as a reading enthusiast, provide me with a well-tuned radar for what books younger readers would enjoy.
Visual Communication and Design
The larger header image has two major purposes; it is used to draw attention towards the theme of the website, and it used to as an aesthetic forefront to draw users into viewing the rest of the site. This is centre of the website, and remains a constant as you explore the website. The colouration of the photo is enhanced by the colour palette of the header font, emphasising the warm tones of the image, creating a sense of warmth, ensuring users feel warm and welcome.
Conforming to the values of ‘aesthetic consumerism’, I utilized photos throughout my website in order to play on society’s transformation into ‘image junkies’; this play on society’s desire for aesthetically pleasing images was used to enhance audience experience of my digital platform, and as an attempt to increase traffic on my website (Schrag 2015).
For the photos I took for this website, and my Instagram account, I attempted to follow the set of rules established in photography in order to optimise photo aesthetics and composition (Liu et al 2010).
The rule of thirds was used for a majority of the photos, by positioning the photos of centre, usually in the lower left corner of the frame.
Leading diagonal lines were used for series, in order to emphasis the first book, then the continuation of the series.
Overall, the most common ‘composition rule’ I followed was framing, by using the books, a blanket, the lights, and the basket in order to frame the books and the photo.
This approach to my website allows for the audience to know what the books look like, as judgements made about books are largely based off of their covers. By projecting them in an aesthetically pleasing manner, allows for a more positive judgement to be made about the contents of the book.
User Interface Design
The layout of my website was simple in terms of what I wanted to design and how the website would be represented. The difficulty came in manipulating the website to portray my desired design.
The first design of my website changed very little from my original concept, though the placement of the my photos has since changed and the whole website has since developed.
The forefront of the website was always going to be the header image, outlined by the menu bar and the title of the website, Library Files.
The home bar itself took a while to design, as the question of what display on the menu bar was considered. I settled on a Genre section, sorting the posts in terms what genre the books belong to. I also included an Author’s Choice section, containing posts about what I read and the books I like, which was a section that was recommended by several of users as form of ‘getting to know the author’.
The recently posted posts are stored on the left side of the page, the latest post at the top, in the larger ‘sidebar’, as the posts contain the purpose of the website. It’s largely surrounded by white in order to emphasise the colour of the photos, the titles of the books, its font, and their categories (Tufte 1997).
The smaller side bar contains only 2 widgets; a search bar to find posts that were posted on specific dates, and a section that contains links to the posts most often visited. This sidebar is very simple in order for the website to remain uncluttered, and for the focus to remain on the posts on the side bar on the left.
This design for the website allows for the audience to easily navigate through both my posts and pages. By simplifying the website, it decreases the amount of difficulty the may be experienced when attempting to find a specific post and/or page, i.e. a book in the romantic or mythological genre.
User Experience Design
By utilising multiple digital platforms, it allows for a larger audience to experience my posts, but also increases the chances that users will visit my website. Instagram was chosen for its photo based posting system, and Twitter was chosen for promotional based tweeting platform.
An additional positive of using social media to promote my website means a more diverse audience, as not all users switch between multiple accounts across various platforms, though they are an increasingly larger portion that do (Kress 2010).
If I were to use another social media platform to promote my website, I would probably look into Tumblr. It appears to a platform that combines the positive aspects of both Twitter and Instagram, and would be used in conjunction to how I have been using both of my current Twitter and Instagram profiles.
My Instagram, @library_files, allows me to post my photos in a promotional manner, by providing with a platform dedicated solely to the posting of images. The images have their posts, and the reviews/recommendations are limited to a small section, which really allows for the photo to stand out. My Instagram profile allows me to reach out and connect to other bookworms and book enthusiasts, or those generally interested in the aesthetics of Instagram styled posts with a focus on books. It is this particular community that I am most prominently focused on (Cohen & Kenny 2015).
My twitter profile, @library_files, is a platform not dedicated to posting the photos I took of the books or for posting any recommendations about what books to read. It is focused on promoting my website and the posts I have recently posted and what posts are coming next. Though I am not well adapted to using Twitter, it’s a platform that has allowed me found a base site for where to post updates about my website and what’s to come next.
Audience Metrics
From the statistics I have gathered from both my social media accounts, and my website, I have come to the conclusion that I don’t have a significantly large audience, not that I was expecting one.
My Instagram has, by far, the most amount of visits likes and comments, with 59 followers gathered over 12 posts and started 6 discussions, all on different posts. My twitter has 11 followers, and has since elicited 2 comments in the past few months. I have been largely unsuccessful in attaining a following of any kind for my website, the spike of views mostly coinciding with our courses’ group forums.
From these metrics and my own personal history on social media, I can state with certainty that Instagram appears to the digital platform that I most excel at using. Both my Twitter and website were unsuccessful in galvanising a follower. This means that I either;
- Need to focus my website more around my Instagram account and begin promoting more regularly on that profile, rather than broadly separating the platforms into separate distinctions, OR
- Better develop my Twitter in order to fully utilise its’ potential and retain a broader image for my website
Additionally, my website is considerably lacking in traffic, which means that I need to find a more efficient way to better promote my website and my social media accounts, rather than solely trusting that time will establish and build upon my network and connections.
Future Directions and Development
My site is founded on a very simple concept; reviewing and recommending books to young aspiring readers. This is a rather simple concept that has so many different and interesting ways to build upon it and transform it into a truly fascinating concept. A way to further expand upon my concept might be to create a YouTube account in which I discuss my favourite books, read sections of my latest novels, promote new book series, and interview aspiring authors. If I wanted to build a step further than this, I could possibly begin writing a novel based upon my audience’s favourite authors, book series, character tropes, and clichés. To improve my current design and concept of the website would be difficult to do without expanding to further encompass an, almost, entirely new concept, such as a pursuit of authorship or the founding of a new YouTube channel. To improve upon my website as it is, would mean to improve upon the promotion of my website across my social media accounts and, as my audience grows, begin to dictate what I post and where I post it in the interests of said audience.
References
Cohen, J, Kenny, T 2015, ‘Creativity in the online community’, Producing new and digital media, Taylor and Francis
Schrag, A 2015, ‘”Pics, or it didn’t happen”: on visual evidence in the age of ubiquitous photography’, Pacific Journal, Fresno Pacific University
Kress, G 2010, ‘Multimodality’, New York, Routledge
Liu, L, Chen, R, Wolf, L, Cohen-Or, D 2010, ‘Optimizing photo composition’, in T Akenine-Moller & M Zwicker (eds), Eurographics, vol. 29, no. 2
Tufte, E 1997, ‘Parallelism: repetition and change, comparison and surprise’, Visual explanations, Graphics Press, Connecticut
🙞 Library Files 🙜 