I decided to check out Teens@Random and Little, Brown Books for Teens specifically so that I could compare and contrast my idea of a great publishing company's teen website and a poor one. The Random House site feels like a PBS Kids games page from 2003, which is the last thing I want to see if I'm a teenager looking for a book. It seems patronizing and looks juvenile, and while it functions perfectly fine I can't help but believe that if I were a teen using it I would feel entirely pandered to. Aesthetic is important for these kind of websites, doubly so when you're trying to engage teens and young readers. I also found many broken links on Teens@Random. When I tried to open Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials featured page it simply directed me to the Random House home page. A few other featured sites I tried, including The Maze Runner series and the Fallen novels directed me to a page saying that the page had moved. It redirected me to a new homepage, but not to anything containing actual information about these series. Many, many problems.
Little, Brown Books, on the other hand, is killin' it. The website is simple, attractive, and strikes a great balance between teen and adult aesthetics. It does, however, lose out in terms of interface. When you go under the "Books" section for Random House, it immediately takes you to their new releases, with options to browse the rest of their bibliography be genre. Little, Brown Books has their titles sorted alphabetically with no option to browse by any other criteria, a feature which is effectively made superfluous by a search bar function. The content for Random House is also superior, they have a "Fun" page on their site which includes interviews with authors, video links, quizzes and polls, and a message board community. By contrast, L.B.B. has a simple but functional "Videos" page and a Tumblr-based community called NOVL. In terms of content, Random House definitely wins, but it's hard for me to get past just how ugly it is. For that reason alone, I'd rather look at Little, Brown Books all day.
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