Your new (DrafT) website

Here is the proposal for your new, responsive website. Nothing is finalized yet (as you’ll quickly see from the Lorem Ipsum content and untranslated portions of the Portuguese pages), but this should give you a feel for the look and layout I am proposing

 
 
 
 

Colors

I’m proposing using a color combination of deep blues and golds, with vermilion accents. I am looking for a color scheme that felt personal and coordinated with the book covers and author photos I was seeing.

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EXAMPLES:

Level One Heading

Level Two Heading

Level Three Heading

Normal Body Text

“Example of how a quote might appear. Curabitur risus neque, semper posuere dignissim eget, tristique ac justo. Curabitur metus lectus, lacinia in dui at, elementum eleifend mauris.”
— Consequat Eget Nisl
 

Site Features

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Completely Responsive

Test it out! If you change the width of your browser, you can see how your site will look on a browser, a tablet and — at the smallest width — a mobile phone.

 
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A COMPELLING HomePage

Your homepage now has more content and graphics, though is still small enough to load quickly on browsers and mobile devices. A lot of the content on the home page — the events, news, your book list, articles and stories — are stored in SquareSpace’s blogs. This means that you can go to one place to update the content and it will automatically update across your site. Change a book over, and it’ll change on the home page, the biography page, and (of course) the book pages.

 

Simple Navigation

I propose reducing the number of navigation options to create a simple set of navigation options, and placing some of the content that had its own “top level” navigation on multiple pages:

  • Welcome Pages: a welcome message, featured content (i.e. newest book), and book lists. On the Portuguese site, which will have more events, there’s also a section for events, site updates and videos.

  • About Richard/Biografia: your bio, your photos (as opposed to an album of photos, I’d suggest linking to your instagram page — you’re already doing the work of keeping that updated, and this would help drive people to it. Mine is linked as an example now), videos, and your books.

  • Works/Livros: all your writing in one place, starting with a featured book followed by your full book list and your stories and articles.

  • News/Notícias: Site news, and links to your social media accounts. On the Portuguese site, there is also a spot for events. Keep in mind: placing “news” in the top of the navigation bar makes it prominent so it should be updated at least once a month. Otherwise, your visitors might get the impression that this isn’t an active site. Placing the social media links here helps with that.

  • Contact/Contactos: Contact information for you and your agents.

Drawbacks of SquareSpace

There’s two drawbacks I can see to using SquareSpace for your needs, but I don’t think either are severe enough to not use it.

1) Only one site language for automatic text. This is a little complicated, but basically the automatic text that appears on event calendars (like the spelling of the months), can only appear in one language. Because most of your events will be listed on your Portuguese site, I suggest only using one event calendar for those events, and displaying the English site events in a different way.

2) Announcement bar: SquareSpace lets you display an “announcement bar” across your entire site (stores use this announce sales, for example). If you were to use it, we’d only be able to use one bar across both languages. If there was ever something you wanted to announce, I’d suggest featuring it in a different way on the homepage.