Case study: Ruth Armstrong

Ruth Armstrong's site home page

Ruth Armstrong is a writer who has just published her first novel - Unsafe Sex. This site was created to promote both her as a writer and her book.

I love my new site, it's just what I asked for and it gives me just the right image

Ruth Armstrong

Ruth asked for something 'simple and classic, with a hint of modern edge' in terms of design. She wanted something that would frame her words without distracting the site visitor from them.

The front page leads you from the main content to the main news page - this has both news about her writing and books and opinion pieces from Ruth - and to an 'About Ruth' page which gives you further information about her. Main navigation is blocked up in the right hand corner rather than spanning the width of the site, again keeping the clean look.

Site design and structure

The site was designed with a view to complimenting the cover design of Unsafe Sex and also to meet her need to promote herself as a writer when further information about new books are added. The design focusses visitors in on Ruth's words. The three column page design allows for extra features - such as highlight boxes - to be added easily.

The site architecture allows for the addition of further book pages as Ruth produces other novels.

Site features

  • Full CSS design, the site is accessible
  • Curved corners to page elements which are produced using javascript and degrade gracefully in browsers that don't support it
  • A news and thoughts page which is run using a news system. This system produces both archived news items and an RSS feed
  • A frontpage newsfeed that produces a 'word limited' summary of each news item