I feel like an unfinished house just burned down. That's what this site has been since it's inception. I could never find the time or urge to work on it. So much has changed since the late 90s and early Naughties when it was easy to build and maintain sites. Most of them were build in MS Notepad, to be honest.
I have a good foundation, but everything currently there is useless to my purposes. I sat down yesterday and mapped out what I wanted and the levels needed to accomplish that goal. Mentally, I was wiped out afterward. I don't remember it being this hard, but it's not easy to add pages currently. I have spent weeks going to view the sites of successful writers with a lot of interaction with their readers to see how they were doing it. Today, I begin looking for themes and images. I want the site to be inviting to anyone viewing it. I saw some really horrible navigation schemes out there and would prefer to avoid that. We'll see how successful I am at that. I'm also studying what color schemes are the most welcoming. This is after a visit to two particular sites that burned my eyes and made me nauseous. We shall judge if I get it right. So... no puce.
I promised updates. I've known several other writers who have done this in the past couple of years and it's always stressful. Also, I wanted to mention this, I will make sure that the site is easily viewable on mobile devices. I visited all sites on my PC, my tablet and my phone and there were a few that didn't transition well if at all, so I will be testing that a lot. I will say this, without qualification, that Christine Feehan's site is the gold standard of what a writer's site should be.
Another thing I am doing today is getting the links to all of my books at all of the stores I can into a notepad document that can easily be copied and pasted when I need them. Those will be tested to hell and gone. Again, my investigations have showed a lot of dead links for selling one's book. I'd like to avoid that. I am providing go buy links because when I find a new author and like another book, I want to just go buy it, not spend the next 20 minutes of my life looking them up on screwed up e-book sites. B&N is the absolute worst.
Have a great rest of your weekend. Here's to hoping your states are re-opening and we can all get some sunshine.