Publisher Websites

After exploring several big publishing house websites, I found rather quickly that they were either very good or a bit confusing.

One of the sites I was most impressed with was Simon & Schuster’s. Their main page features new releases, best sellers, author appearances, and other news about the company. This front page alone hits several different audiences with different reasons for coming to the site. I found the site extremely easy to navigate, which is something that cannot be said for many of the sites I looked at. The top of the page contains not only a bar with different links to find what you are looking for, but also an area to search the site. On the link to categories, virtually every audience is covered, from teens to Latino interest. Links to authors, books, community, and multimedia are also covered. You can also easily purchase books directly from the site. Simon & Schuster does a good job catering to their various audiences by having such a multifaceted and user-friendly website.

One of the websites I didn’t think did as good a job was Random House’s. Upon going to their page, I immediately accidentally clicked on a little popup for the Random House Speakers Bureau about “booking an author for your next event”, which I think almost every audience would find annoying. Upon navigating back to the page, I felt completely overwhelmed with information. Simon & Schuster had a great deal of info on their main page, but it was spaced neatly and coherently, so it was easy to process and find what you were looking for. Random House’s site featured so many pictures that I wasn’t sure where to look first. On top of this, many of the pictures were extremely blurry and poor quality. I think something could easily be done about this. The Random House site also features many subject categories for different audiences to explore, but they are in an almost complete list on the sidebar, rather than the less overwhelming pull down menu featured on other sites. Random House has many great topics and books featured on the page, but it is such an overload of information it doesn’t seem accessible. I don’t think the average audience member for this page would enjoy it. I didn’t.

As a consumer of books, I think the main things the audience looks for in a publisher’s website are a wealth of information, organization, ease of navigation, and accessibility. Simon & Schuster’s site did a great job with this, but Random House’s site could do much better.