I’ve been building websites for a long time.
A very long time.
I’ve built ecommerce stores, corporate sites, lead-generation sites, membership systems, marketing sites, custom applications and more redesigns than I could possibly remember.
Some were technically difficult. Some made clients a lot of money. Some were beautiful. Some solved very complicated business problems.
But I recently built one that may be my favorite of all of them.
It is LukmanClark.com, the website of author, artist and screenwriter Lukman Clark.
And I think it may be the most awesome website I’ve ever built.
Not because it has the biggest budget.
Not because it uses some revolutionary technology stack.
And not because it follows all the accepted rules of what an author website is supposed to look like.
Quite the opposite.
It’s awesome because somewhere along the way we stopped building an author website.
We started building a world.
An Author Website That Didn’t Need Another Bookshelf
Most author websites are fairly predictable.
Here’s the author.
Here are the books.
Here’s a biography.
Here are some reviews.
Here are buttons that take you to Amazon.
Maybe there’s a blog.
Nothing particularly wrong with any of that. Those things all serve a purpose.
But Lukman’s work gave us much more interesting material to work with.
His stories move through ancient Alexandria, reincarnation, philosophy, hidden realms, cryptids, historical mysteries, Japanese folklore and things that occasionally go bump in the night.
Putting all of that into a conventional author template seemed like an enormous waste.
So we didn’t.
The homepage begins with three illuminated doorways.
Each leads into a different storyworld.
The Wind Rose Conspiracy.
Hypatia: In Her Own Words.
And the still-emerging world of Etsuko: A Coming of Age Phantasy.
You’re not immediately presented with a catalog.
You’re invited to choose a doorway.
That one decision eventually changed almost everything else about the site.
What If the Website Were Part of the Story?
This was the idea that really opened things up.
Instead of asking:
How should we present these books on a website?
we started asking:
What if the website itself were part of the experience?
That is a much more interesting question.
Once you ask it, ordinary website conventions stop being quite so important.
A page about monsters doesn’t merely have to explain monsters.
Maybe monsters can actually be hiding on the page.
A page about unexplained creatures in Australia doesn’t have to be another long article with a few pictures.
Maybe the visitor can discover the creatures and collect records of them.
A historical examination of Hypatia doesn’t need to look like another article.
It can become a case file, complete with exhibits, evidence and an unresolved finding.
An excerpt doesn’t have to sit inside an ordinary text box.
It can feel like an illuminated artifact someone has uncovered.
A book doesn’t have to be represented only by its cover.
It can become a place the visitor enters.
And once we started thinking that way, there was really no reason to stop.
Then We Built a Passport
Visitors exploring the site can uncover six major experiences.
Enter the world of The Wind Rose Conspiracy.
Listen to an audio excerpt.
Open the Hypatia material.
Consult Hypatia.
Investigate the cryptids.
Examine the Case of Hypatia.
Each discovery illuminates another seal in a Storyworld Passport.
Complete the journey and the visitor becomes a Keeper of the Hidden Worlds and can create a collectible card.
No registration.
No email address required.
No account.
Progress stays privately in the visitor’s browser.
This wasn’t designed because somebody told us “gamification improves engagement.”
It happened because it made sense inside the world we were building.
That’s an important distinction.
There is a lot of technology on websites today that exists because somebody read that websites are supposed to have it.
Pop this up.
Capture that email.
Add this widget.
Force that conversion.
Sometimes the better question is simply:
Would this be fun?
Would somebody want to see what happens next?
Would they poke around just because they’re curious?
Those are legitimate website design questions too.
Then Things Got Stranger
Which, in this case, was a good thing.
We created a Storyworld Oracle.
It doesn’t pretend to predict the future. Instead, it asks a series of atmospheric questions and determines which of Lukman’s storyworlds seems most aligned with the visitor.
Then it gives them an archetype and a path to follow.
We built collectible monster records.
Australian cryptid field records.
Artifacts from The Wind Rose Conspiracy.
An Alexandrian archive.
Memory echoes connected to reincarnation.
Personal mementos.
A Collection Vault where discoveries made across different areas of the website can be found again.
There are things that unlock.
Things that remain classified until discovered.
Things that appear only after the visitor has done something.
There are audio experiences.
There are secrets.
There are pieces of the site we’re still expanding.
And one of the things I like most about it is that a visitor can completely ignore all of that and still use the website normally.
That’s important.
The experience is there to reward curiosity, not punish somebody who simply wants to find a book.
Ask Hypatia
One of my favorite parts of the site takes the concept in yet another direction.
Lukman has spent years researching and writing about Hypatia of Alexandria, the philosopher whose life and death became wrapped in legend over the centuries.
So instead of merely publishing more material about Hypatia, we created an interactive experience where a visitor can essentially ask Hypatia a question.
That’s where a website begins crossing into territory that barely existed a few years ago.
A traditional site publishes information.
You read it.
An interactive site lets you manipulate or explore information.
But now we can begin building websites that actually respond.
The visitor isn’t simply navigating pages anymore.
They’re participating.
That idea interests me enormously, and I suspect we’re only scratching the surface of what websites are going to become.
Not Everything Needs to Lead Directly to a Shopping Cart
This project has also reminded me of something that gets lost in the constant obsession with conversion optimization.
I make my living helping businesses sell things online.
I believe in analytics.
I believe in calls to action.
I believe in measuring what works.
But not every square inch of a website has to scream:
BUY SOMETHING.
Sometimes fascination is part of the sales process.
Sometimes curiosity is.
Sometimes spending fifteen minutes chasing monsters around an author’s website may create a stronger relationship with that author than seeing the same book cover and “Buy Now” button for the fifth time.
The books are still there.
The buying opportunities are still there.
But now there are reasons to stick around.
There are reasons to come back.
There are things worth showing somebody else.
That’s marketing too.
The Best Part Is That It Isn’t Finished
This may be what I enjoy most about LukmanClark.com.
There really isn’t a natural point where somebody has to say:
The website is finished.
The basic site can be finished.
Pages can be finished.
Features can be completed.
But the world doesn’t have to be.
A new book can open another doorway.
A new character can create another interactive experience.
A song can become an artifact.
A monster can appear somewhere unexpected.
A secret can unlock something nobody knew was there.
A new story can produce an entirely new collection.
And as Lukman’s upcoming Etsuko: A Coming of Age Phantasy develops, another world is already waiting behind its doorway.
That changes the relationship between the website and the author’s work.
The site no longer just documents what has already been published.
It can grow alongside the stories.
AI Changed What I Could Imagine Building
There’s another piece of this I can’t ignore.
The tools available to me today are dramatically different from the tools I had even a few years ago.
AI has not replaced the work of deciding what should exist.
If anything, this project has reinforced my belief that the idea is still the important part.
Someone still has to say:
What if there were three doors?
What if visitors collected seals?
What if the monsters moved?
What if the website remembered what they discovered?
What if there were an Oracle?
What if Hypatia could answer?
What if finishing two experiences secretly revealed a third?
AI can help me explore those ideas, write and refine code, iterate much faster, test possibilities and build things that previously might not have been practical within a client’s budget.
That’s powerful.
But the interesting part isn’t that AI helped write some code.
The interesting part is that the distance between “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “Here it is—try it” has become dramatically shorter.
For someone who likes building things, that’s a pretty exciting development.
After All These Years, This Is Still Fun
That’s probably the real reason I’m writing about this site.
After more than two decades of building websites, it would be easy for another website project to feel like another website project.
Header.
Navigation.
Hero.
Content blocks.
Call to action.
Footer.
Launch it.
Move on.
LukmanClark.com didn’t feel like that.
At various points I found myself thinking:
I wonder if we can make this happen.
Then we’d make it happen.
Which immediately led to:
Okay, now what if we did this?
That doesn’t happen on every project.
And it reminded me of why I got interested in this business in the first place.
The web was never supposed to be just a collection of interchangeable templates.
It is a medium.
And a pretty amazing one.
We can build stores with it.
We can build applications.
We can build businesses.
We can publish information.
We can teach.
We can entertain.
And every once in a while, we can open three mysterious doorways and invite somebody to step through one.
Go Explore It
Trying to explain this particular website only gets you so far.
You really have to poke around.
Open doors.
Ask questions.
Investigate things.
Click on something that looks suspicious.
Look for things that aren’t immediately obvious.
And if something strange happens, that’s probably intentional.
Visit LukmanClark.com.
I have built a lot of websites over the years.
This one may be the most fun I’ve ever had building one.
And I don’t think we’re anywhere close to finished.