Nate Klaiber

Heartsong Presents Website Launched

Heartsong Presents is a Christian fiction romance book club. This is one of several sister sites to Barbour Publishing, Inc.. This site made its debut almost 10 years ago and hasn’t changed much since. It was a tabled design targeted for 640x480, used Cold Fusion, and had an Access Database for its engine.

My recent task was to bring this site up to date and to meet standards. This meant doing the following:

Design Issues

• Removing all tables and spacer images.
• Removing all font tags and inline style elements.
• Updating tags to be XHTML compliant.
• Creating page layouts with CSS (targeted for IE).
• Targeting 800x600 browsers (still a wide user base with this resolution).
• Make sure the site degraded gracefully and had CSS print options.
• Descriptive title and meta tags (in progress).
• Tags are logical and semantically correct.

Structure and Navigation Issues

• Cleaning up the site structure and navigation menu.
• Cleaning up the URL structure.
• Mapping previous URL’s to new URL’s where possible.

Programming and Storage Issues

• Removing all links to Access database and update to our internal system.
• Sorting options on all pages.
• Add the ability to search the site.
• Updating the book and author detail page with more information.
• Add modules for our Hall of Fame authors and our Featured books.

The site is still a work in progress. Some of the design elements will be updated by our in-house designer, as well as some more features will be available to the user.

I firmly believe that you can never get better at something if you can’t take some criticism — so here’s your chance! I would like you to help me with the following:

• Let me know if you find any program bugs, and where you found them.
• Let me know if you find any layout bugs, and what browser/platform you were using (screenshots may even help).
• How is the usability? Is the site easy to navigate and find what you need? What would you update/change?

I know that may seem like I am asking a lot, but you can just give your feedback if you would like (you don’t have to answer all of the above questions)

Resources:

• Updated Heartsong Presents website