Mobile and Website Design for Author Website
Martin Shannon
The Web Design Brief
an author website with urban fantasy roots
Martin Shannon arrived at his website design with an idea for his marketing plan — with a time table for story releases, a plan for an email marketing list, and a diligent work ethic, Martin engaged me to pull together the wrapper: a website that reflected his ties to Florida; a key setting in all of his work. We developed his content architecture collaboratively and iterated through a handful of concepts for his brand before building his WordPress site.
The brief for Martin-Shannon.com consisted of seven webpages and one Mailchimp email mailing list design to the theme of the primary setting in his books: “Weird Florida”. All designs were prepared to be responsive for mobile, tablet, and desktop environments, and we arranged the content manager to easily allow Martin to edit his SEO content and web page copy.
Through discussion and collaboration, video chats and frequent messages over the course of the project, we tried four or five different colour palettes, and collected a number of found objects pertaining to his world building to anchor the site to his book series. Using Google Docs, I outlined the guidelines for his content architecture, and Martin got to work drafting copy for the site.
We didn’t stop there, though! To ensure that Martin could easily continue editing his website for the future, I prepared a number of video tutorials for him that provided instruction to edit his website copy, use his plugins, and update his images if he changed headshots. We also got his email list up and running. The entirety of the project was completed in ten days, on time, and under budget.