Holy mother of balrogs….
Has nobody ever pointed out to them that a 2476 x 3508 pixel image should be scaled to 220 x 312 in Photoshop, not in the user's browser?
According to the Pingdom size checker, that freaking thing is over 30 meg … most of which is being spent on those ginormous images. I took a look when I saw them oooooooozing onto my screen. Admittedly, my system's kind of hammered right now (about nine zillion Firefox windows, plus the Delphi IDE because I'm working on TableMaster … yes, on a Sunday afternoon, gotta have it demo-ready, though of course not complete, in time for Game-O-Rama on Friday!) so I expect to be able to blink my eyes a couple of times before a page loads … but with that one, I quite literally took a drink of water while I was waiting for the images to finish.
Aside from that, the incessant scrolling makes my eyes hurt. Or my brain hurt. (come to think of it, given that I've been sitting in this spot staring at this computer for eleven solid weeks at this point, maybe it's not the scrolling) And every time I try to focus on something, it zips off the screen!
Also, gray on white -- and all caps, yet! -- is a terrible choice for the descriptions. Sure, it's stylish … but people buying books don't want stylish, they want readable. Which it isn't.
That website is a perfect example of the kind of thing that's developed to meet the customer's expectations … except that the customer in this case is the person who's paying for the website, not their customers. So it's all wow-gee-whiz-ooh-ahh stuff, which impressed the customer, but doesn't do nearly as good a job of selling the customer's product (in other words, doing what that customer actually wanted!) as it would without all the glitz.
When you think about it, what impresses you more about the value of a book? The cover picture? (enough so as to be worth spending upwards of 3 meg, in some cases, of bandwidth on those pictures?) Or the description of the book and what it's about? The cover might sell books to the kind of people who buy bestsellers and Harlequin romances, but they don't buy military history books. When you're selling anything, whether it's books or boots, you have to get across to the customer how he will benefit from buying your product. "You'll get a nice cover picture" doesn't do that with us; "you'll get all this useful information about such-and-such a part of history" does. Yet the cover pictures are massively emphasized (2-3 freaking meg each!!!) while the brief snippet of description is de-emphasized, by making it lower contrast than the rest of the page and all caps, thus harder to read. (thanks to the extent to which I've been trading sleep for caffeine lately, damn near impossible to read)
Ah, I shouldn't get ranting about that, but sometimes I can't help it. You see, during the 16 years that I gafiated from the game industry … well … I've been a freelance website designer. *chuckle* You know how they say the cobbler's kids go barefoot? wintertreeredux.com -- the site for the once-and-future Wintertree Software -- is downright embarrassing. I just threw it together overnight and haven't done more than sticking in the occasional update, like about the free hex-paper font or the link to the blog, since then. I've got other things on my mind now, like writing software. But even at that, the ultimate minimalist website (and mostly using graphics cribbed from my old site that I built about 20 years ago) it's STILL better than the 33 meg of scrolling book covers and the low-contrast text. There's not much there there, but at least the user can see it!
Well, not my problem anymore. Someone else can pitch them a repair job; I'm grinding code.