One of the most attractive author Web sites that we’ve seen lately isn’t even finished: David J. Rosen’s I Just Want My Pants Back.
This is what we’re calling a placeholder site: the book doesn’t even come out for another month but the site exists since publicity is already coming out about the book. We think that’s important. There’s a little note on Rosen’s site that says “Full Site Coming Soon”. Honestly, this site is already so much better than many author Web sites that it doesn’t really need anything more but we’re anxious to see what the site’s creators come out with next. So, this will be one we’re watching.
Of course, since the author David J. Rosen is a former advertising executive it’s not surprising that he realized the importance of quickly establishing an attractive Web site for his novel.
See the trailer
There has been a lot of talk lately about book trailers (even more talk than I realized) and I Just Want My Pants Back has a trailer:
We’ve still not made up our mind about book trailers. Of course, nothing hurts and if you have the resources to do a good trailer then do it by all means. We’re going to have a future post about book trailers, something that we must do since book trailers are already being called the new book cover.
Flash, the good & the bad
Flash has its purpose on the Web and I Just Want My Pants Back doesn’t overuse it. Actually, the site hardly uses it at all and could have been done just as well in HTML/CSS but we suspect the full site will make more extensive use of Flash. In the right hands a Flash presentation for a book can be very nice, but it’s a case-by-case basis.
One of the things that we really dislike about Flash is seen in the Pants site: the site has links to Amazon and other online retailers so that you can pre-order the book. Now, personally, I like to open links in new tabs so that I can keep the original site opened. But when I hovered over the link in Firefox and right-clicked: no menu option to open the Amazon link in a new tab. Flash replaced the normal mouse menu options with its own Flash options, which were all useless to me. I hate sites that force me to change my Web browsing experience.
Still, Pants is a good use of Flash, it loads quickly and the future full site of Pants should be very interesting.
Wow. So now we can see the movie about the book before it’s madeinto a movie. I was skeptical, but the trailer for I just want my pants back is entertaining in its own right. He should post it on YouTube.
[...] we talked about David J. Rosen’s I want My Pants Back site. We called that a placeholder site but it’s also a book site rather than a broader author Web [...]
[...] month we wrote about David Rosen’s nicely designed placeholder Web site for his novel I Just Want My Pants Back. The full site is now finished and David has introduced a very innovative feature that allows you [...]