Website Update, January 2021

By: Sara Cleveland

As you can see, things are looking mighty different around here and on my socials.

Now that I’m getting back into the game this year with planned releases and regular blog posts, I thought it was time that ye ole website got a fresh coat of digital paint.

Right now the website updates are almost purely cosmetic. It started with a new brand logo commissioned from GetCovers.com. From there I followed their recommended branding guidelines to develop the new stylesheet.

For the blog, I decided to simply re-color the existing WordPress template. Because honestly? I hate working with the nuts and bolts of WordPress templates, even though the content management for the blog is fantastic.

I do have more updates I’d like to get done in 2021. First, I will be adding additional stylesheets to make the site more mobile-friendly. Second, I’d like to devote a new section to freebie shorter works as well as a place to find upcoming book previews without digging through the blog. I’ve been working on a backlog of shorter fiction, and I hope to share some of it on the website. Finally, I want to make some serious upgrades to the Contact Me screen.

This next part is for you tech nerds: I am debating a change in hosting so I can really do some upgrades, but there are some details I need to make sure I understand about the blog portion of the site, specifically, before I take that kind of leap. I’d like to be able to rewrite the whole thing in a modern javascript framework and get rid of some of the stuttering that you sometimes see in the animations on the main site. I can’t do that while I remain on my current hosting due to the limitations of traditional shared hosting.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about this. Please, let me know what you think, especially if you stumble across any bugs (broken links, browsers that display funny, etc).