Your feet’s too big! And the font’s too small!
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The website’s layout needs fixing more. Pain in the ass for mobile / tablet.
Best I’ve ever seen is http://www.ilona-andrews.com/
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vs. your competitors
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[img]http://imgur.com/nX2L6zpl.png[/img]
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[url=http://i.imgur.com/HrqeHl1.png]
[img]http://imgur.com/HrqeHl1l.png[/img]
[/url]What desktop browser are you using?
Fonts look fine to me in Chrome. They should scale by resolution and browser settings since I use relative Font sizes.
Yes Mobile is something of a problem, particularly for phones. I need to work on that. Particularly for Kindles.
The system that I use DNN and YAF (Yet Another Forum) have some mobile customizing features that I will look into.
Thanks, you did something, and now the front page looks much more legible.
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[/url]I’m on Chrome, the same browser I use for my work.
27″ 2560×1440 screen.
> 2560×1440 screen
That I understand. My notebook has that resolution (on a 15″ screen) and it’s a huge problem for older applications that can’t dynamically scale fonts.
I actually pull out a magnifying glass in some cases and hold it up to the screen (too hard to figure out that stupid regional zoom tool program)I really need to go in and edit the CSS files for the whole site.
For the front page, I can change the relative font size on a box per box (section by section basis). However, it would take me forever to do that on all the pages, which is why I need to make adjustments to the CSS.
I will probably hold off on that until beta season starts again and I am waiting for comments. Right now I’m trying to avoid too much distraction from writing, since I am actually getting stuff written.
Fortunately, one thing you can do in Chrome is Zoom the page; that is something I do on my laptop all the time.
For years, my folks only used Opera on their iMac because that was the only browser that let them magnify the page. Although they magnify to a level that layouts are all zonked…I can’t stand that.
There’s a reason why for a few years now, unless you’re a huge consumer site, going with Bootstrap is the only thing that makes sense. https://getbootstrap.com/css/
Yeah, legacy CMS and EIM platforms aren’t necessarily equipped to handle standards other than the vendor’s, since that wouldn’t facilitate lock-in.
Why not dump this problem in the lap of your fans? Spec what you want to accomplish, and then have then plan and execute the project, for example, to move your content from a CMS to a static generator and a de-facto standard framework such as Bootstrap. Your forums to http://www.discourse.org/. Or whatever your priorities are.
Well, I had a lot of this stuff up in the 90’s as part of the RPG I wrote with a friend while writing book 1. And that was painful static content
So then I went and moved it all to DNN.
However, it’s not that big of a deal; there is a master CSS file for this stuff. It didn’t take that long to go from red to blue with font changes. That’s not going to be that hard, once I figure out what styles need to be adjusted and play with them. It’s the learning how to customize for mobile that will take me more time.
The system allows you to define settings on a per device basis; I just have to read up and play with it.
I actually have several of my sites in DNN because I got tired of maintaining custom sites and yada yada.
OK. While we’re at it, could I stay logged in to the site permanently, please?
Apropos, a number of indie authors aren’t as technically savvy as yourself – does Amazon or somebody provide them with a “How to set up your literary web presence” pamphlet or something, or are they at the mercy of any passing huckster?
I mean, if you’re a starving artist, AWS services such as Route 53, S3 and CloudFront would pretty much provide you with everything you need for setting up a static site for a buck or two a month.
WrapBoostrap.com will sell you an excellent add-your-own-photos-and-content theme for a cool twenty bucks.
I’ve seen a number of authors complain about their hosting bills, or the time required to set up their presence. They can’t be getting good advice.
Unfortunately that’s something this CMS doesn’t support, permanent log in. Or at least I haven’t seen how you would enable it.
Yes, most authors are stuck with whatever huckster comes along.
I have had for a long time a server sitting in the Internet, I’ve moved around a few times. I started out as just a hosted site with a SQL backend then moved to a dedicated server about 15 years ago.
I’ve got my personal sites, my business sites, and some development/demo sites on it. I’ve also got a backup mail server running on it.
So I can do about whatever I feel like. In this case, I am using an open source CMS call DNN (DotNet Nukem) and YAF (Yet Another Forum) for the forum. YAF is open source and has a DNN version as well as standalone and some other CMS system.
Godaddy and a lot of the hosting companies will sell you a site only relatively cheaply and give you some tools to design a site. You often don’t get things like forums, just static pages and an email link.
I think a number of authors also use WordPress sites; that’s what many bloggers use. You can get those relatively inexpensively.
If one understood Tumbler, that actually would be good. I don’t do much with my book tumblr; when I started using tumblr I really didn’t know how to design tumblr websites…but you seriously could use that for an author site. And you can of course use Facebook as long as you are a glutton for punishment.
The trick in all of this is just knowing what to look for, and my bet is that most authors don’t. It would seem to me that it would behoove Amazon to improve the customization capabilities of their Author Page and add some features for authors that are in their Kindle Select Program etc. If they wanted to they could do all sorts of cool things, but it is like they aren’t thinking that much. They went out and bought goodreads and this other site, that I can’t think of the name of now, but the two are merging (it’s the place where you can fill out character data for the book and have it end up on the Kindle)
Anyway, they’ve got these two cool sites, they just need to put all the stuff together better.
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