Locus Online
 


 

Welcome to the redesigned Locus Online website! There's a principle in engineering that you should "plan to throw the first one away," meaning that when a project is sufficiently ambitious and unlike any previous experience, you don't figure out how to do it until you're nearly finished. So the best final result comes from throwing the first effort away and starting over from scratch. Which is pretty much what I did with this website, after several months of maintaining it and comparing it to other sites on the web.
      The principal reason for making radical changes was to realign the section headings with the actual content of the site, and to allow the structure of the site (both the underlying directory structure, and the linking relationship between pages) room for expansion. I also tried to make the overall design of the site more consistent between all sections and pages. And there were numerous technical issues, about page naming and browser and hardware limitations, to be considered.
      In addition, I've added a number of online-only features that attempt to implement in a manner suitable for the web the things that Locus magazine has done in print: provide timely notices of new sf publications; provide up-to-date information about author appearances, and so on. Plus, there are things easy to do on the web that would be impractical in print, such as maintaining cumulative lists and indices of past material. More of these features, such as the index of books reviewed in Locus, will be forthcoming.
      I hope you find the site more useful, and easier to use. Please feel free to offer comments and suggestions. Just as authors (and reviewers) get surprisingly little feedback directly from readers, so webmasters get scant reactions from websurfers. It's so easy to click and move on...
--the webmaster
26 Oct 1997

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