Recently I was given the chance to design a website for a friend who happens to be a poetry author. The initial website was created with only one of their books in mind. However they were planning on releasing a new book soon and felt that the site needed to be revamped. You can view my redesign for this site via my Figma project.
The initial design of the home page was a promo video of the first poetry collection. I knew for both the users experience and for the sake of the second collection that this would have to be changed. I opted for two big color blocks that advertised the two different collections. At the very bottom of the page I weaved in the old author page. I did this for two reasons. The first being, I liked the way it looked (hehe). Secondly the old author page wasn't visited too much, so by merging the pages I had hoped more users would reach this content.
These were pages that didn't exist before. I kept the same sort of idea from the home page, and populated these pages with the big color blocks from that page. Along with those blocks I included some carousels for sets of images taken by the author. These images were taken with the purpose of being paired with lines of poetry from the different collections. I took this idea and made the carousel of pictures into what looks like a collection of polaroids to give the site a scrapbooky sort of feel.
While it's still a little early to tell, I hope that this re-design results in more sales for the author, or at the very least for people to peruse the site a little longer. On the old site most people bounced off the first page pretty quickly, so I'm hoping to at least retain some traffic a little longer. I will update this page as I gain more information on what users are doing on this site.