Web Design Example - Theresa Breslin

Theresa Breslin is a well known and highly regarded Scottish author who writes predominantly for children and young adults and her site was quite a challenge because of this diversity of work. It had to appeal to a wide age-range - children looking for information about their favouite books and characters as well as adults such as teachers who wish to have information about the author herself and extracts that can be used as the basis of projects. While there needed to be a unifying feel throughout the site there also needed to be considerable variation to match the individual books being highlighted.

A Viking theme was adopted to match one of the most popular books and to reflect a degree of celtic background, and was developed with the choice of font and a bronze-gold 3d effect for the header images. The menu was chosen to be irregular images with roll-over effects - the images themselves being redolent of parchment treasure maps or chiseled stones to generate an appropriate atmosphere.

Some of the pages such as the Dream Master series needed to be lively and have features that could be explored, so various moving layers were incorporated with triggers on images using mouseovers and clicks. Others such as Remembrance were much more dependent on setting the right feel.

As Theresa's writing has progressed, with most of her recent books being for an older age-range, the needs of the website have changed and a redesign is being considered to reflect that.