This weekend we relaunched
my website after some work that I originally thought would "just" be cosmetic.
Cosmetic. That's tweaking, right? How long can that take? Well, it took about two-and-a-half weeks, though we're not talking two-and-a-half weeks of eight-hour days. My computer guy ended up using a lot of his snowdays on this project.
Many of the issues we ended up dealing with in this revamp are the same kinds of things we'd be considering if we were starting a website from scratch. So if you're thinking of getting started with a site or you've been wondering if it's time to do some touch-up work, yourself, you may be interested in what we've been doing these last few weeks.
What Got Me Started
My website is quite old, going back to 1998. We've made many changes since then, of course. Recently, though, I'd been feeling that my site was very white. That's not ethnic commentary. My website was
very white meaning that its pages seemed to spread across computer screens, which are now often quite wide, in an unattractive manner. But what to do about it?
Last month I happened to read some articles in
More on
personal branding. The two issues I was particularly interested in:
- Using color to help brand. Color has attributes it communicates when it comes to branding. Yellow is supposed to communicate creativity and intellect, as well as energy. I most definitely am not a pastel person. Any pastel. But I thought I might like some kind of gold in my website, maybe an autumn-type color. Yellowish.
- Finding ways to unify your brand message across your social media platforms so readers/viewers begin to recognize you, wherever you are. Color can be a unifying element.
What We Did And Why It Took So Long
Originally, all I wanted to do was create a colored border around the pages of my website. Because I was interested in gold, which is similar to the theme of this Blogger blog, we would immediately be providing some unity between these two platforms. But once we placed the gold color around each page, the color we'd been using for the hyperlinks clashed. All the color on all the links had to be changed. (By the way, we changed the theme on my
Twitter page to conform with the color of my website's hyperlinks, thus creating some uniformity with that platform ,too.) Then Computer Guy started really getting into this and gave the space behind the text a little hue-like color, so we really were rid of the white. This was also more in keeping with the blog's appearance.
All this had to be done to every single page in the site. In case you weren't aware, I have a very big website. It's
deep, meaning it's multi-leveled. A link from the homepage leads to another page and there are links there that lead to still more.
While we were touching everything, anyway, we were careful to bring any outdated material up to 2015.
And, Then, Fonts
Things were looking better, but now I wasn't happy with the font. Fonts, it turns out, have attributes, just as colors do.
Serif fonts, for instance, are associated with artistic, intellectual, and warm attributes.
Sans serif fonts are considered technical looking. Computer Guy loves sans serif fonts, which are very straight and have little embellishment. I, however, have always been a Times New Roman woman because it looks like the text in a book. TNR is a serif font. Serifs have little extra bits at the end of letters and, like TNR, look like what we'd expect to see in books and other publications.We decided to go with a serif font for the text, which would require more reading, and a crisp sans serif font for headings.
Sounds as if we're done with fonts, right? No! Why not? Because a certain number of fonts are preloaded onto every computer making that computer capable of rendering text accessed from the Internet onto its screen. There are fonts that are commonly used. If I were to choose an uncommon serif font for my website, one that many computers couldn't render, they would have to use a fallback font that may or may not look the way I planned it to. Thus, I needed to choose common fonts.
Some Things We Didn't Change
Believe it or not, I have some very specific views on websites. These views are related to communicating messages and making communication easier for people receiving my messages.
- My homepage, my users' first stop when they come to my website, includes real content. I want my users to get something immediately for having made the effort to come to www.gailgauthier.com. I don't want them to have to click again to "enter website." I don't want them to be faced with just a menu.
- I'm not into bells and whistles. Things that move and pop are slow to load. I value my users' time. As a user, myself, I sometimes leave sites while I'm waiting for gimmicks to load.
- I avoid distracting clutter. I want to make the reading experience on my pages comfortable.
- I try to keep content short. I believe the reading experience on the Internet is supposed to be different from other kinds of reading experiences. Is is supposed to be fast. That is not a bad thing. We can read long in other places. That's true of blog posts, too, by the way. If I can't keep a blog post short, I use sub-headings, the way I am today, so users can pick and choose what they want to focus upon.
In Conclusion
This was a fun thing I hope we don't have to do again for a while. "A while" meaning "years."
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about dialogue tags, the little bits in a piece of writing that indicate someone has spoken. Author Martyn V. Halm discusses some additional ways to deal with said and tagging in WRITING: Dialogue and the 'Said' Rule. 
In What is Cli-fi? And Why I Write It in The Guardian author Sarah Golding describes climate fiction as "fiction that foregrounds climate change." Her interest in writing it appears to go beyond using it as a setting, world, or spring board for a plot. She's trying to do something specific with her cli-fi books for young readers. She hopes that her characters' concern for the environment will spread to her readers.
To my knowledge, we only had one storm cancellation in February. (Edit: Heard this afternoon, Feb. 24, about a cancellation at the end of January.) Since I'm working on this post during the tail end of another snowstorm (Look at the snow blowing past my window!), I should probably suggest that you check with venues if there is any doubt of a March event being cancelled because of the weather.
Mar. 10, Cindy L. Rodriguez, Town Hall, Tolland 6:30 PM
Last week I wrote about the relationship between place and time. "Where we work," I said, "is often related to when we work." Sometimes we don't choose the places we work. Sometimes we work in them because we just happen to be in them when we have time to work.
I found The 57 Lives of Alex Wayfare by M. G. Buehrlen on my Kindle. I must have gotten a sweet deal on it sometime last year. I love finding things on my Kindle.
I haven't done a Weekend Writer in quite some time. This week, though, I stumbled upon this post on dialog tags at Page Curl Publishing and Promotion. No idea, noooo idea how I find these things. But dialogue tags can be a problem for new writers, and this Page Curl post makes some good points. Thus, a weekend writer post.
The Scottish Book Trust posted a list entitled 8 Books About The Environment (Teens) at its site. Included is the hardcover edition of Saving the Planet & Stuff.
I haven't seen any bobcats out in back of my house, but that doesn't mean they aren't there. This trail we crossed, it could have been made by a bobcat. And what if it was a coyote trail? A coyote has as much chance of rallying the troops as a bobcat. Coyotes are tricksters.
What was really disturbing was the top of this knoll where the wildlife had obviously been gathering.
The size of the trail leading to this spot was impressive. Disturbingly so. Deep and wide. A lot of beasts had been using it. It takes some organization for a group to create infrastructure like this.
Now, as you can see, I am a fan of Little Miss Bronte Jane Eyre by Jennifer Adams with illustrations by Alison Oliver. But that's not why I'm making a point of mentioning Redbook including it on its Christmas list. No, I'm doing that because Little Miss Bronte JE was published nearly three years ago. Three book years is like thirty human years, if you're talking about the Middle Ages when thirty was old age. Usually only the shiny new books that have just come out or even haven't come out yet get coverage in the press. So it was really notable to see an older book being promoted.
Last week I forgot to bring a book with me to the Laundromat. What to do so I wasn't wasting that precious wash time looking at old magazines? Why I whipped out my trusty iPhone and looked up one of my favorite will power people, Kelly McGonigal. iPhones are wonderful, by the way. So is the Internet. Don't let anybody make you feel guilty about loving those things.
I am a big fan of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Jane Austen and Seth Grahame-Smith. I thought the literary mash-up of Austen and zombies worked "very well in the context of the original Pride and Prejudice story because in Austen World the hunt for a husband is life and death, much like encounters with zombies." In Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, the Bennet daughters had pledged to fight zombies until they were "dead, lame, or married." Marriage is pretty much the end for the Bennets in whatever universe they're part of. And the book is funny.
This afternoon I attended Lynda Mullaly Hunt's book launch for her second book, Fish In A Tree, which goes on sale in four days. The event, which included a number of games set up at staffed stations as well as at least a half dozen raffle items, a book sale and signing, and a quite marvelous short talk, ran from 2 to 4:30.
I got there around 3:30. When I arrived, there was the kind of crowd I'd expect to see at a group appearance. I was told it had thinned out. Earlier in the afternoon, the Barnes & Noble staff person running the book sale had been worried about running out of books.
