I am asking for suggestions about the web site, not its contents. If you have any comments to make about the latter, please use the Bulletin Board or send me an e-mail about my opinions of individual detective-story authors or books.
The web site is basically a hybrid, starting with one web page in 1996 (Top 50 List), then going on to an index page (preserved here), both on AOL at first until they became so obnoxious that I moved on to a new, self-controlled domain which was named Mysterylist.com. The main menu for the new domain is pretty much what you see now at home page, and I'm very happy with that, and it does get updated fairly often -- not as much as the contents pages, however.
What I'd be interested to know (and I WILL listen to your suggestions) is how I can improve the site. (Again, address comments about content either by e-mail or through the public comments areas, because the only thing this page is about is design and structure.) Apart from the home page, the older ones from AOL, and the occasional pop-up or nuts-and-bolts page like this, there are two other designs in operation.
(2) The individual authors' pages, which all follow pretty much the same format: my home-made graphic at the top, description, list of books, and comments on them, and sometimes some footnotes. What varies is the solid background color -- I thought it was cool at the time to make each one a different color, but that is now considered a no-no in web design. What do you think?
The former is rather primitive in that it doesn't have any 'modern' design elements apart from the drop-down menu. The latter is more problematical in that the juxtaposition of the text and background colors is hard for some people to read comfortably. My general question is does this combination of formats work as a web design, or do you prefer the varieties of pages to look all the same as far as appearance goes? I will listen to either opinion, since I also listen to Web Guru Do's and Don't's (and ignore them mostly). Whether I will follow up is another matter, but I would like to know about any pages on this site that you have difficulty reading because of infelicitous background/font combinations. That is my biggest problem because I have no sense of color coordination (Turner and Van Gogh -- gee, great paintings and they are all yellow!).
Current fashion is to have Frames (or an appearance of same) with an unchanging nav-bar on top and a variable one on the left side -- at least variations on that theme: all very Microsoft. (I've done that myself on some of my web pages.) That works very well, and most people are now used to it, but hell, in this case I'd rather do it my way!
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