New Website is Good to Go

I posted a few weeks ago that I was working on redoing my website. It was a bit of a rocky process, but I’m happy to say that I’m now done with it, more or less. Back when my website was first set up, more than 10 years ago, I paid a friend to do it for me. At the time, one of the big struggles was trying to figure out how to have enough content to make it seem like a real web page. I just had one book that hadn’t even been published yet, and so I was relying way more on talking about potential projects. True, I had the blog, but my blogging skills weren’t quite what they are now. (Go figure. When you spend a ton of time trying to come up with things to say each weekday, you eventually get better at actually saying it. Don’t believe me? How about this post, my second blog post ever? Come on, past Bryce! These days, I could get at least 500 words out of being tired. Without even trying!))

Anyway. Now that I was revising my website, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to flesh the site out. For one thing, I have four books that are professional published (plus Cavern of Babel, of course). For another, my blog is way (way) better than it used to be. So I sat down and just thought about what I wanted to focus the site on. I didn’t need anything earth shattering. Just a good framework for the blog and for people to find out about the books. You’d think that would be a pretty low bar, but even so, it took a while.

I ended up paying for a theme on WordPress. (I used Astra, which has a ton of tutorials about it.) I wanted a newsletter as well, so I paid for a plug-in that’ll do that. I still want to have a store where people can buy signed copies of my books, but that’s not ready yet. However, it turns out when you have enough money from your books to actually pay for things like a business, things are easier. It also helped that WordPress has come a long way from when we were tinkering with it before. It would have been even easier if this were something I did on a regular basis, but I don’t, so that’s that.

Still, all told I’m pretty happy with the site. It’s clean and simple, and it should be easy to update the next time I have a new book coming out. (More on that later . . .) Take a look around. If you see something that’s still being wonky, let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix it. With my luck, there’ll be a bunch of problems still, but I’d rather know about them than not.