It’s exciting when a long-neglected website gets a refresh. At least, it’s exciting to the owner and designer, and possibly some few others who live for the vicarious thrill of webmastery and graphic design.
New Content
Part of the plan is to port over excerpts from the essays I’ve written for The Mythoversal Newsletter and add more going forward.
I’m also going to be updating all the cornerstone content on the pages.
Theme
Aside from content, the real vicarious thrill of web design comes from a discussion of themes. New themes are a vital part of any refresh as styles and tastes moves on, new technologies come online, and the freshest pixels of 2016 begin to seem laughably dated.
I’d put a lot of effort into the old theme, which included planets and a spaceship that users could spin around with their cursor. I’m sad to see it go, but as I’m now writing more mythic fiction, the Tigershark Transport had to sail away into the Eagle Nebula for the good cause of thematic consistency.
The new theme has no shiny spaceships but it’s shiny in a different way. I went with Eksell by Anders Norén. It has lots of great features and looks very modern. It’s also the first theme I’ve encountered that matches the “dark mode” status of the device it’s displayed on. Sold! I’m all about dark mode.
Later this year, the entire paradigm of WordPress design is set to be overturned, and probably this new site will quickly become a very dated “old style 2021 look and feel.” Such is life in the fast-paced world of web design.
Logo
I have a logo now.
I have never had, nor realized that I needed an author logo. But how did I ever got along without one?
Invisible Touches
Aside from changes you can see, there are lots of backroom fixes involved in dusting off a long-neglected website.
The server’s got a new flavor of PHP now, making it more secure.
A dozen plugins are again up to date, temporarily, plugging security holes and fixing bugs.
I have an SSL certificate now, so you can load my website without encountering a scary security warning.
The web form for author visits is spam-filtered using a Google reCAPTCHA.
There’s still plenty of work before the new site is officially relaunched, but I think I’ve made a good start.
I hope you like the site and that it will help readers connect to me and my stories. Let me know what you think about the changes.