As some may have figured out by now, my not-so-secret goal in life is to sell the books I write, become a whoop-de-doo romance author on the NY Times Bestselling List, make lots of money doing it, and then show up wearing shutter shades and saying things like, "Ta, darling, I simply must get these edits in." (Yes, I'd be trading a life with one set of deadlines for two. I know.) The only thing standing between me and total romance-market domination is getting the darn book finished. The blasted middle just doesn't want to be written.
This brings me to my point: how making websites is like writing a book.
In the writing world, there is a condition -- a blight, if you will -- called "The Sagging Middle". This is the phrase used to describe the obstacle of or problem with a full-length book. (Trivia: A book that is approximately 100,000 words is called a single-title book, while a book less than 80,000 -- like a Harlequin novel -- is called category. I write single-title.) 100,000 words is a lot of writing. It's 400 pages, more or less, of double-spaced Courier New, 12pt, 1-inch margin type. At least 15 chapters, sometimes as high as 30. It's a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes an epilogue. I hate epilogues, but this is beside the point. I'm also not a fan of prologues. I'm an equal-opportunity -logue-hater.
Most authors have no problems with the beginning or the end. In both sections of a book, the action is high, the drama is high, the pace is fast and furious. You're setting up or wrapping up the plot. Bullets are flying, dialogue is sexy, the music is loud. Whatever the case, you have meat to the matter and you know exactly what to write. And then there's the middle. The middle is where the action slows down. The climax of the story (har har, don't think I don't know what you're thinking) has not been hit yet. The Great Reveal is still lurking in the shadows. An author must somehow push the plot along without losing the substance of the book, keep the reader interested. It's far, far too easy to gloss over the middle, thereby causing it to -- you guessed it -- sag. Suddenly, the middle just isn't as strong as either the beginning or the end.
(Am I the only one who skipped over most of the Sam/Frodo "I'm walking, I'm walking, I'm tired, We're walking" scenes from the The Two Towers and Return of the King books? ... Just checking. Please put the torch and pitchfork away.)
Creating websites mirrors this almost exactly. It starts with the client meeting and design. Excitement is high. We've got ideas, ready to design and implement! It ends with the finished product. The cut is in place, the markup is sweet, the whole thing is uploaded to be adored by adoring viewers!
The Sagging Middle begins with the end of the home page design.
I freely admit I suffer from this blight in all things, up to and including my own web page designs. I start with the home page. It's gorgeous. It looks like candy. I want to lick it. And then I start cutting. Whee, cutting! Markup, CSS, all the works. And then I click on one of the links that take me to an internal page and I stop. And I stare. And my mind goes blank for a good long minute. And then I think to myself, What the blazes are you thinking, you idiot?!
I have forgotten, or not cared, to design the internal pages with as much forethought as I took for the home page. I have engineered my own Sagging Middle. The design of the home page is pretty, the content is good, but the bridge between the two -- the prettiness of the front page and the awesomeness that is the textual content -- is completely missing.
Let's be honest. No one who isn't writing a thesis or specifically looking for a quote is going to waste the time to wade through a wall of text. Designing elements to break up the monotony of the internal "meat of the matter" pages is every bit a part of the "making a website" process as getting characters from point A to point B without killing them is a part of writing a book. If a reader gets to the middle of the book and, lo and behold, get bored mid-way through, they will put it down and go find something else to do. Then you get bad reviews on Amazon, someone flames your blog... it's civil war, man.
The concept holds true on websites. The link or button or little 'x' at the top of the browser is just a heartbeat away, and viewers will click it. Make no mistake. You have to keep them there. It's only one part what you're writing, and everything to do with how you're writing it and what it looks like. Face it, webpage-makers: we site visitors are a vain, shallow, judgmental breed, and we will close a site at the drop of a hat. I've been known to do so, myself.
Web Developer Weems wrote a blog article about designers and home pages, which is actually a great precursor to how to avoid The Sagging Middle. The concept is simple: design all the types of pages. All of them. Don't design the home page and then casually mention, "Hey, there's two more types of pages, just make it look like it goes with the home page." That's the same as saying, "The characters start in Seattle looking for a murderer who killed the girl's cousin and then they fall in love and end in New York just as a comet hits it. Somewhere in the middle, a guy is going to die, so just go ahead and fill in whatever there, get them to New York, and make it sound right." (In writing, the concept for avoiding The Sagging Middle goes more like write an outline, you lazy slacker of a writer, so it's at least similar.)
The reason I bring this up is because, well, I am guilty of a Sagging Middle. I love making home pages, love writing beginnings and endings to books, and utterly fail at keeping up the pace towards the middle of the project. This is something I am not only encouraging myself to work on, but everyone out there who makes web pages and/or writes books. Get it down to a system, and you will never go wrong.
... Well, "never" at least until the comet hits.
