Love at a Reasonable Price

This time the Interactive Design Foundation wanted to know if we thought our site’s main page was properly ordered, by which they meant: most important stuff always first; important stuff also at the finale.

The boys didn’t seem interested in arguing about this one. In fact, they mostly acted like they took the question seriously. I don’t think they did. I think they just didn’t care to think much about it, because they did not notice any moral red flags, and they were sleepy in body, mind and heart.​

I think we’re OK for primacy and regency in the overall structure of the landing page of from-bartleby.com.

First is the book. Right now it’s the main thing BW & AW have to offer.

Second comes the newsletter sign up. I think that’s important since we can send them info about new products as they arise, supposing they do arise, which they might.

Then a synopsis of everything covered on the page.

Then more info on the book and another link to it (again, the main thing so far); followed by a quick contemplation of the animating premise of novelty gift items with image-links to the WAP novelty store (since we’re trying to make WAP into a place where we make money both with literary endeavors and with little embodied charm); followed by an advertisement for Pure Love / critique of advertising / tip jar (we are very interested in raising human consciousness to heights so great that advertisers lose their hold on us all, although this site’s main idea is to be an advertisement for our own products); followed by a link to the page organizing all the poems, essays, freewrites and etc that the site’s author’s posted over the last several years of lonely larking (this is just for people who really want to hang out with the WAP crew all day long!–that eager super-minority will happily wait for their bugle until the page’s end). After your impassioned speech on the importance of recency, we again listed the links we’d introduced throughout the page.

The paragraphs are often only a sentence long, so we often don’t need to worry about whether or not the first sentence in the paragraph is the most important. But let’s look at two longer ones:
A description of the ebook: OK. First we list the primary content, then the secondary content, then we mention the relevant but not super important fact that the stories were written years ago now.
A discussion of the novelty gift items. The paragraph itself does not put the most important info (we’re selling novelty items; these are what they are; get them here) first, so we added (!Novelty Gift Items!) to the heading of the section so people would not get confused by our decision to launch first into flim flammery and then into a mini-essay about the raison d’etre of novelty gift items–at least as we mean to wield them.

This site is to some degree a literary endeavor, so we don’t need to split our heads over questions like whether or not each sentence starts with the main idea. Such concerns make sense when your audience has no interest in literary flourishes, but of course if you’re in no mood for literary flourishes, you’re in no mood for Wandering Albatross Press.

AMW/BW