…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the out­come of the Making War. This is the incred­i­ble and unlikely story of how a brother and a sis­ter, and other young heroes, cre­ated the bal­anced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the mak­ing. We uncover new bits of infor­ma­tion reg­u­larly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.

Brenda Cooper, co-author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, con­tacted me a cou­ple of months back, inter­ested in how I might help pub­li­cize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.

The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young char­ac­ters and an inter­est­ing set­ting that is both rec­og­niz­able and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” sci­ence fic­tion, and I really enjoyed them.

From read­ing the books, I sug­gested devel­op­ing a web­site for the series as if the site was the dig­i­tal pres­ence of an actual insti­tu­tion in the world. The web­site would pro­vide sam­ples of the books for read­ing, and an ency­clo­pe­dia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.

The Academy of New World Historians is the orga­ni­za­tion respon­si­ble for assem­bling the his­tor­i­cal texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of inter­views con­ducted by these his­to­ri­ans. The goal of the web­site is to share their pub­li­ca­tions with the rest of the Five Worlds.

The site is built on a WordPress frame­work, using a cus­tom theme. It’s fairly straight­for­ward in design and con­struc­tion to reflect a cul­ture that val­ues sim­plic­ity and usabil­ity in inter­faces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really inter­ested in try­ing out the “expanded nav­i­ga­tion” method that I’ve imple­mented on the home page. You can hover over the sec­tion titles and see addi­tional infor­ma­tion for the sec­tion, such as links to spe­cific topics.

Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would rec­om­mend them even if Brenda were not a client.

Tagged as: authors, brenda cooper, clients, Science fiction, Web Design