Oh what a tangled website we weave

You need a website.

If you are a writer, an artist, or a business owner, this has become a physical law. I was given this pearl of wisdom years ago, perhaps in the Jurassic Era, when I was just starting out, writing articles for Riding Magazine.

So I went looking for a website tool, and found one where my email account was - on Yahoo. They had something called PageBuilder, which was pretty easy to use, and more importantly, pretty easy to update.

I confess, I'm a tweaker. Just as I like to tweak my manuscripts before I send them out to agents/publishers, I also like to tweak my website as I think of cooler things to do with it. So I built my site with PageBuilder and played with it constantly, until...

Yahoo came out with a new, improved tool called SiteBuilder and stopped supporting PageBuilder. This meant, if I wanted to continue to fiddle around in my webpages, I had to convert to SiteBuilder, which was only a little less complicated than converting to, say, Islam.

Still, once I learned SiteBuilder, it was again easy to manipulate and I was happy in my playground, until...

Yahoo came out with a new, improved tool and stopped supporting SiteBuilder. You'll notice I'm not naming this tool, mostly because at that point, I snapped and refused to rehost anything to a new platform. I dug in my heels and continued to play in SiteBuilder, even though I had to reinstall it every time I wanted to edit anything, which is at least once a week, due to updating my newspaper column pages. I still enjoyed SiteBuilder, but I constantly worried about the day when I couldn't make it work anymore and my website was frozen forever, just like that face I used to make that Mom warned me about.

Enter Jeremy Lee James, riding to my rescue on Write Click Web Hosting. I've known Jeremy for a long time, from the Southern California Writer's Conferences, and knew he was a webmaster extraordinaire. I also knew 1) he charged, quite rightly, a fee for designing a website, and 2) I needed more control of my website than he might be able to grant me.

However, Jeremy's newest invention, Write Click Web Hosting, allows a user to create their own site using Wordpress. Now, you can do this yourself by just going to Wordpress, but he gives your website a more hack-proof security system and provides daily backups, all for a small monthly fee. Yahoo was already charging me a small monthly fee for all the work I was doing for them, so I thought I'd try it out.

Working with Jeremy was a very good experience, in that he was ever-so-patient with my occasional lapses into idiocy. He has a bunch of video tutorials explaining how to do things, and I'd kind of watch them, then try things on my own and screw up. It's how I roll. Jeremy was always on the other end of an email, explaining calmly how to back myself out of the latest mess.

Things were smooth until we got to the part where I'm almost ready to go online with the new site. I had pared down my pages, cleaned things up, but my new site looks very similar to my old site. Here's the thing: Jeremy is a very elegant, classy guy who thinks that websites should look elegant and classy. And mostly, I think he's right. So when he sent me the email saying, geez, did I really want my new website to look so much like my old one, meaning kinda goofy and casual and distinctly NOT elegant, my first response was, wow, maybe not...

Then I looked in the mirror and said, "Who are we kidding?"

I explained to him that, while I agree in theory, in practice I am not elegant. I am a humor writer, even in my mysteries. I need to be a little goofy and irreverent and casual. My website needs to reflect that sense of whimsy.

God love him, he understood my point, and agreed.

My new website is now up (http://gaylecarline.com) and ready to be picked apart by the rest of the world. I'm always looking for comments as to how I can make it better, so don't just placate me with kindness. But don't slap me, either.

I'm going to end this post with links to websites of a few of the many authors I like, so you can see how their sites support their genres.

Andrew Peterson - thriller writer. His site points you exactly where you need to be at all times, kind of like you're the sniper's bullet.

Michele Scott - mysteries, women's lit, let's just say multi-genre. Her website is being redone, but even the temporary page gives you an idea of who she is.

Alexandra Sokoloff - horror, suspense, paranormal, creepy (her books, not her). You know you're not getting "light and fluffy" when you click on this link.

Christina Dodd - romance. Okay, I've never read a single thing she's written, but I love this website. I want to live there. Don't kvetch at me, I'm not a romance reader, unless you count DeAnna Cameron's The Belly Dancer, which is mostly historical fiction and really cool.

**OH, and for the record, I am NOT being paid or recompensed in ANY way for recommending Write Click Web Hosting. It's just something I'm using with a great deal of satisfaction. And none of the authors mentioned have ever done a darn thing for me in exchange for mentioning their books and websites. I'm just a giver.

At least I've got my site

It took me a couple of weeks, but I finally did it - I redesigned my website. While everyone agreed my old site was clean and easy to navigate, they also agreed with me that it was a little too schizophrenic (and for the schizophrenics out there, I mean that in the nicest way). After that, everyone seemed to disagree about the colors I used, or how to solve my split-personality problem.

Let me just explain why I couldn't hire this out: it wasn't the money. I need to update the links to my newspaper column every Thursday. I have a mailing list of people who get pissy if they can't find this week's little bit 'o' Placentia heaven. So I needed a website I could massage by myself.

I visited several other author websites and got ideas from them. In particular, I like the way Ridley Pearson has his home page adorned with a fancy headshot, pointing me in one direction for his adult writings, and a goofy caricature, pointing me in another direction for his children's books. I also like Louise Ure's site. Great colors, clean lines, love the geometry of it.

Like I said in a previous post, my website began with a simple, if ambiguous, goal - get my name out on the Internet. Now that I know who I am and what I want other people to know, I used what I liked about Ridley's and Louise's sites to focus my site more clearly.

Before you visit it, let me walk you through my thought process.

First of all, I wanted a banner for every page to remind everyone who I am. On the old site, I referred to myself as a "writer, rider, and maven-in-training." I decided to refine this to "author, columnist, and maven-in-training." I kept the maven moniker because I needed a category to cover my miscellaneous writings and a 'know it all' should span everything from journalist to humorist.

Second, I needed a color palette to tie the pages together. I prefer lavender and other shades of purple, but when I tried it out, it looked like a romance writer's site, which is not me. So I went to the blues and found a nice teal and periwinkle. I paired them with grays for a neutral base, and added a little yellow for pop.

I built the banner to include photos that 'brand' me - pictures of Placentia because that's where my column appears and my mystery is set, pictures of me with my horse to tie me into my equine writings, and a picture of me as a child, looking rather peevish on a rocking horse. No doubt, I was peevish because it wasn't a real horse.

Once the banner was built, I started with the middle of the home page, focusing on my books and career as an author. To the left, I put my exploits as a columnist; to the right are my miscellaneous meanderings, under the Maven tag. They are sublisted as Odds 'n Ends, Fits 'n Giggles. From there, I created pages to: 1) tease people into wanting Freezer Burn, 2) invite them to buy Missing, 3) give my fans their weekly dose of What a Day, and 4) give curious cats a glimpse of my equine writings, as well as some flash fiction, with pictures and without.

I'm hoping people like the new look. I think it looks fresh and really easy to navigate, but what do I know? Come visit http://www.gaylecarline.com/ and see what you think. Go ahead. Kick the tires, take it around the block, let me know if there are any screws loose.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave

It's funny how the same topic will be on so many people's minds. I had been thinking all week that as soon as I could, I wanted to blog about my website, and LJ Sellers' latest blog is about - drumroll, please - websites and blogs and whether you need both. Great minds...

In the beginning, I had a website. I got one because some expert somewhere told me I needed one if I was going to be taken seriously as a writer and get the word out about my wordsmithing prowess. Even though I'm a software engineer by training, I decided to go with a kind of 'plug-and-play' site builder because I didn't want to take the time away from my new career as a writer just to learn html. I used Yahoo's Small Business Web Hosting to pick a template and fill in the blanks. I named it www.gaylecarline.com. Genius, huh?

It took me a little while to get the content right, mostly due to the fact that I didn't know what I was doing. At the time, I was writing journalistic articles for Riding Magazine and humor columns for the Placentia News-Times. You could say I felt divided, and my website reflected it. Finally, I got it all sorted out, and added buttons to lead you to whatever half of my writing personality you wanted to hire. In an attempt to garner more interest in my humor, I also put some funny pictures with funny captions, to show people that I'm funny.

Fast forward to now: I'm being published! Freezer Burn will be out in September 2009, I have a story in Missing, which is now available, and I've started writing the second book of Peri's escapades. I still want to write my humor column. I no longer write my Riding column, but if my editor called and asked me to cover a show or interview a trainer, I'd do it in a heartbeat, just because they gave me my publishing start.

So what I'm asking is, what should my website look like now? Please take a look-see, if you've got the time and tell me: Where should I focus? What's working? What needs to go away?

Even if you don't want to give me specific suggestions for my site, how do you think your website reflects who you want people to think you are?