(Disclaimer: The following is intended as a tongue-in-cheek window into my own psyche, not a complaint about critiques of any kind!)
Today we got a heads up from buddy Elaine about a post on a site called TeleRead about Lynn’s comments on AvsM and the CC site. I’m glad she let us know. It was a very nice post and the comments were all very encouraging and understanding… except for one chap who, while very positive about the whole idea, voiced some… concerns… about the CC site, implying the webdesigner was (erk) incompetent and old fashioned. 
Now, I tried hard not to take this personally, and you all know I’ve been more than open to constructive criticism, and overall, his observations were constructive. I’m glad he mentioned his concerns, and maybe he thought he was dealing with a professional webdesigner, which I most decidedly am not. I’m sure he didn’t realize how hard we’ve been working to put all this together. But as I say, he definitely made some legitimate points: mostly things I’d been meaning to address eventually anyway… So I spent all Sunday evening checking out the site and trying to “fix” that which probably wasn’t all that broken in the first place.
First, he said there was no access to the store other than from the main page. This one truly had me scratching my head. Isn’t there a “products” tab at the top of every page? The one right on a line with “Home” “About” “CJ” “Jane” and “Lynn”? That’s a live button to the catalog. Now, that “products” tab arrived with the plugin that gave us the shopping cart. I wasn’t sure if it was safe to change it, so I’d never bothered. Seemed clear enough to me. But evidently it wasn’t as obvious as I thought. So, I went and checked out some other sites that used the same shopping cart and saw that they called it other things, so… back to CC where I changed it to “Catalog”…which is what it says on the page, right? Because that page isn’t all there’s going to be. We do still plan to have Cafe Press and maybe more. Calling it “catalog” put its tab right after the “about” tab and before CJ’s, (the program puts the tabs in alphabetical order—except for “home”) so I thought, OK. That’ll work.
And went on to the next constructive criticism.
“A short synopsis of every book would be great…” Okay. That’s definitely legit and something I, at least, plan to do. Lynn and Carolyn can handle their own books however they want. I’ve got to draw the line somewhere where it comes to working on the page. But so far that project has been cursed. Every time I start working on a format for the individual pages, something like this comes up and I never get around to it. Someday. In the meantime, each of us has written a little piece on each project under our names. (His comment said he didn’t know anything about us or our books…Ummm… That’s what those extra pages are all about.) But now, rather than on the backburner, the indi pages are on the front, so I imagine I’ll get it done tomorrow.
Next!
He said the page looks old fashioned with funky colors and lots of pics! I mean…
well…we like color! And pics…here I thought I was being so conservative, with just the little slideshow of our bookcovers and my single “indulgence” of the horse-drawn shopping cart. I mean, sure, we’ve got specialized buttons, but we need buttons! and there are the pictures of us in the “about” section, but that’s pretty innocuous. Other than that, it’s just the catalog. I mean…what could he have been talking about?
But something gave him that impression…So…I went back to the page(s) and actually addressed another minor problem that’s been bothering me ever since I put the little animated shopping cart up: I put the slideshow on the left rather than under the shopping cart. Now the page is sort of “generically active” rather than just on the right side. It does balance better. Of course, when I moved it, it naturally had problems with positioning. After about an hour and a half work, I finally got it to look acceptable, tho it’s still not what I want. And…the pix I used were pngs, which I should probably changed to Jpgs, which are smaller…but…sheesh. Ah, well. It’s just time. (After finishing this post, I brought up PSP and made the change to jpgs….I’m such an obsessive-compulsive.)
Then, on the catalog page, I again did something I’d been meaning to. I sent all the “how to” stuff to the other “how to” page and got the product up where it should be. I also, thinking of his “graphics heavy” impression, changed the “Name” buttons out for simple text. I have to admit, it does look better.
Then, being wide awake, I sat down to write this post and suddenly, I found myself thinking about that first comment, where he said the only access was from the entry page. So…just what did I call it there? I checked and (ack) it was “store.” So, I changed the page name…again. Then thought, maybe I should clarify further, just in case someone thinks that dropdown menu for “cafe press” is the “store” in question. So I called it “E-book store” but that put it in between CJ’s button and mine, which looked dumb. So I named it CC E-book Store, to put it ahead of CJ’s, but that looked even dumber, so I went searching for some way to make the tab go where I want it and found a little square well down the edit page that lets you force the page order.
Snoopy dance! I put a little 6 in that little box, renamed the page one more time to E-Book Store, saved and called it good.
The real point of this post is, given a hint that something might possibly be problematic, the creative mind can make it be a problem and find some way to change it. Whether that change makes the end product better or not is frequently debatable.
In this case these comments basically gigged me into doing some things I’d been meaning to do anyway on a project that is near but not necessarily dear to my heart, and far from finished. I’m actually glad he made an issue of them, as it got some round tuits off my list. But imagine if we allowed book reviews on the site? Reviews we would have to vet in order to maintain the site. What if we got a review that had the same sort of nitpicking, but possibly marginally legit comments on one of our stories? Or even one that praised it to the sky, but for all the wrong reasons? I know I at least would start second guessing myself and my story, maybe even fight an ongoing battle with myself against editing the book yet one more time, since that’s so dangerously easy to do on ebooks….
Yup…I think maybe it’s best just to let people review our books someplace else. Now, I’m going to have a nice cuppa tea and go to bed.
