I recently had a meeting with Tom at DigiPrint to discuss website improvements. One of my sessions with my book publicist Brian, had been to look at my website and see how it could be improved. Brian had found a number of things that were easy to fix. There was one typo, a piece of text that needed a heading, and social media buttons that didn’t work. Tom had fixed these from my email before our meeting. The things that needed more thought and discussion to yield website improvement were as follows.
Browser domain identification. When I first met Tom I’d asked if it was possible to detect a browser’s domain, and direct them to the appropriate Amazon site for their country. I understood Tom to say that it was. But that’s not what my site currently does. We appear to have had a misunderstanding. Although he says there is a plug-in that will do that, it comes at a price, and a monthly fee. So the compromise, the website improvement, is going to be this. The buy button is going to offer US and UK Amazon site options. That covers about 93% of my readership, and if we had buttons for every Amazon site it would be too cluttered.
The most challenging website improvement for me to think about was the banner. At the moment, the top half of the home page is taken up by a banner about The Suggested Assassin, until now, the most recent book. On a phone, it takes up all the screen. Brian pointed out that the book cover photo conveyed The Suggested Assassin so what is the title conveying. He was right of course. I gave it a lot of thought. If the banner is the first thing people see, I want it to do two things. I want it to shout SERIES. I’ve blogged already about the advantage of a series. The other thing I want it to shout is LATEST. The book cover can convey which book is the latest.
Brian also suggested that our “Read it now” button should not take you to the Amazon site directly, that should be a BUY button. He suggested that READ should take you to the Look Inside button on Amazon. It seems that isn’t possible, so I have done the next best thing which is to provide pdfs for the first chapter of each book. Hopefully, reading the first chapter will make readers want more. The final website improvement that Brian suggested was giving readers who don’t like Amazon the chance to buy elsewhere. My books are listed on Waterstones, so we’re going to add that to the BUY button menu. I’m looking forward to seeing these website improvements in place.