Blog Topic #11: Project Research

This blog topic is sort of a freeby as we were doing this for our final projects anyway, right? My final project is to do a sort of author's website for myself although I am not yet published. It is fun to look at other children's books websites for ideas and inspiration and just to enjoy the artwork. Now that I am in this class I can can better assess what I like and don't like about their website designs as well. Here's three I really like. They all achieve what I want: they promote the author's work in a showcase true to their spirit and sensibility and sense of humor.

Laura McGee Kvasnosky has a nice website that is fairly simple: www.lmkbooks.com

She has 17 books in publication, including a very successful series about two fox sisters, Zelda and Ivy. The nav buttons are little framed pictures of her characters that swing when you roll over them, cute.
Her pages include a bio, list of books and an activity section with a painting demonstration, paper dolls to cut out and other activities. There is a journal or blog post section but it doesn't appear that she is active on it. The site is straightforward and her artwork is captivating. Interestingly, the site designer also has a link on her page: Max Waugh, and if you go there you will see he has himself published several children's photo books for ipad/iphone. I would like to explore that further.

Dav Pilky is one of my favorites, not so much for his fabulously successfully Captain Underpants series, although the kids in my carpool adore it, but for his earlier series of books about Dragon, especially A Friend for Dragon and Dragon's Fat Cat.  So, funny, yet so poignant and I adore his paint style. He has scads of books out now, 6 series and lots of singles, AND he just won a Caldecott medal. Not bad, Mr. Pilky! I am both proud and jealous of you!

www.pilkey.com 

His website is just as busy as he is, this guy must be a little hyperactive, he is making a wacky movie now. I think this guy must be having lots of fun, he has large amount of creative energy. He calls his website, grandly, Dav Pilky's Extra Crunchy Website O'Fun and claims it "Stops Wetness", Fights Odors" (one of his characters is Super Diaper Baby) and "Stays Crunchy in Milk". I love the humor, and hope I can make my website fun and funny. Despite his website's busy-ness, it is still easy to navigate, with links to the MANY games he has designed, his bio, his book list, a search box, stuff for boring adults, boring stuff for adults (two different pages, which sort of fail as neither is really boring) if you poke around there is more and more stuff here to keep one busy for hours, which I guess is the point.

Lastly, the wonderful William Joyce can be found at www.williamjoyce.com. This website is very different from the first two. Nice and clean, with different rollovers to each of his series and movie work, Robots, Meet the Robinsons, Rolie Polie Olie, a link to his publisher (which doesn't really work, perhaps at one point there was an author site for him through Harper Collins?) and foundation work he has done for New Orleans/Katrina.

I would look at webpages for wanna-be authors like myself, but I don't know how to find us! So far we are invisible, I am hoping a website can grow and support my efforts to get published.