Website Update – Real Blog Post

Hi Everyone! Welcome to ForcedSimplicity.com version… gosh, 4.0? Something like that.

I’m still somewhat in awe of these background flash videos. When I first started making websites in high school, we were coding basic HTML on Notepad, back when animated .gifs were actually considered cool and the < blink > tag worked all too well. During my webdesign heyday I made a ridiculously involved website – each page was a single photograph with text photoshopped in. It told the story of You, who woke up with no memory on a beach and your exploration of a tropical island. The links (both navigation and to things like my portfolio, etc) were all image map links on those photos, thanks mostly to my haxzor Dreamweaver program. I even had embedded .wav files of birds and wind, so when you mouse-over the links sounds would play. Very immersion, very time-consuming, very unnecessary.  I eventually gave up webdesign altogether.

And now… well, nowadays you can drop some cash on a WordPress template, grab your webcam and a video converter, and BAM – you’ve got an instant full-screen looping video website. It seems magical to me, like those paintings in Harry Potter – what should be a still image is alive and moving. Hell, I could record myself writing this blog post and make it the background video!

I’ll spare you my ugly mug this time.

My plan is to really have fun with the template – I have a Flip Mino HD camcorder, so taking 720p video is easy as pie. I’m going to take a lot of different videos and upload them all, then randomly change the background videos as my whim dictates. Particularly for the homepage, there should be like, ten or twenty cool-looking videos to choose from.

But, what is it all for? BOOK SALES. The whole point and purpose of this website is to have something vaguely professional to funnel traffic to the Amazon.com buy page. I get a tiny fraction of each book sale on Amazon (instead of the 50% of a direct sale from me or the publisher), but it is easier to sell things in an arena people are comfortable with. If I go on this internship in April I won’t be able to update this page… well, probably won’t be able to. In that case I’ll be able to rest well knowing there’s at least something fun for people to look at.

In the end, I realize this isn’t a traditional structure for a sales-oriented website – there’s no “buy now!” link on the main page, no clean interface or white background, no up-front quotes about how great my book is.

Oh well. At least it looks cool.

Get Volume 1 Now!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 29th, 2010 at 20:18 and is filed under Blog and tagged with publishing, Volume 1, website. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.