This week I am reviewing Sitong Li’s site luodenghua.com, CROWN OF THE KING. Immediately upon opening the site, I was greeted by an elegant, dark red patterned background and a selection of images that visually complemented the site’s warm colour palette.
Navigating to the site’s About tab revealed a drop down menu with the options: About Me, About Game, and About Evan Lu. As I went through the 3 sections, I learned a bit about Sitong as a second year communications student at SFU and the focus of her website: a romance video game called Light and Night.
The website focuses on Sitong’s favourite character from the game, Evan Lu, and through the character’s ‘about’ page and blog posts, provides the audience with background information and game/character lore in a simple and easily-understandable way. Sitong also explains that she intends to generally discuss the genre of romance or otome games where the player plays as a female protagonist and features male love interests, whether or not the viewer is themselves familiar with or plays said games.
As a whole, the site is very aesthetically pleasing and presents a clear online persona of the author and her interests. As Danah Boyd wrote, even prior to the internet and social media teens have “tried to create publics from their own homes,” and they “often use media and new technologies to do so” (2014). This is something that can be seen in this website, as it is aimed at a very particular audience, sharing content for this specific public.
I particularly like the thoughtfulness of the site’s design in terms of navigation, as nearly every page has neatly organized buttons that redirect the user to other related pages, or dropdown menus and text boxes that provide further context and information. This design allows the individual pages to maintain a simple appearance when first opened, but lets the user conveniently navigate deeper into the site.
The site also makes effective use of images, either providing a visual reference for users who may not be familiar with Light and Night and the character of Evan Lu, or by adding personality and individuality, as seen in the ‘About Me’ page.
If I were to make any suggestions, I would note that on a few pages, such as the ‘About game’ page, contain some quite small text, or text colours that slightly blend into the background such as on the Blog page. The layout of the Process Posts page also feels slightly cumbersome as navigating between posts requires returning to the initial page. Adding a way to navigate from post to post, within the individual posts themselves would make reading through them more fluid and seamless.
Ultimately, Sitong’s site feels like an ernest and genuine presentation of one of her interests, while also having a unique and clearly defined visual aesthetic that seems to compliment the tone of the game and character in a meaningful and intentional way. While I may not be at all familiar with the website’s primary subject, I appreciate the site’s design and the intentionality behind it, and I am interested to see how it develops further over the duration of the course.
References
Boyd, Danah. 2014 “Searching for a public of their own.” It’s Complicated. pp 213-227