Every five years or so, I get the urge to update my writing website. Wix’s website editor has been a bit temperamental through this round, but still I persevered.
The home page has a very short bio and buttons leading to different parts of the website to make it a bit easier to navigate. The slides are gone, too. They were colourful and cute, but I don’t think onlookers had much patience for them. This has been replaced by a separate page with a plain list of publications listed from newest to oldest. I may tweak this over time. The slides had links to buy the physical books published in, PDF zines and publications with more than one work on one webpage which is why they were kept separately from my other fiction and poetry sections.
I was surprised at just how many of my works published in magazines led to dead links. I have had to archive my choice picks in my Blog, with context, approximate publication date and the links in question to prove they did actually exist.
Speaking of: I have deemphasized and unlinked some of my older fiction pieces. They don’t reflect who I am as a writer anymore. Most of these pieces were written before 2016 and I feel my prose has improved significantly since then. I have asked for two of my short stories to be taken down as I wanted to redraft them for the short story collection I’m working on. My choice keeps appear in the main publication section I mentioned earlier.
Because of this, some of the artists bios that have previously appeared in the Artists Contributors pages are no longer there. This is because their piece no longer appears on my website. Thanks so much to Aspen Clark, Robert Neil and Kevin Main for lending me their work.
The Poetry section of my website has had a bit of an uplift. The repeater I used for this section ended up being too long to the point where I couldn’t scroll towards entries further in alphabetical order. I tried to copy and paste the one I had before, but this proved a bit futile so I had to start again from scratch.
My ‘About’ bio reads less like a short story, I hope. There are a few short paragraphs with some links to my Medium page and link to my YouTube channel. It also has a gallery of choice photos rather than a slideshow of any and all performance photos I could get my hands on. They’re not the most flattering but performance photos rarely are. I’ve put the information and links about my podcast Starter Quest in its own page. I was surprised when it appeared very high up in the SEO when searching for the podcast though I shouldn’t have been.
For me, my website is a good way for me to track my progress and publications. It’s a nice reminder that even in my down days, I can still get things done. Hence why I started the retrospective posts in 2020.
Apologies for such a late update post but sadly life got in the way. I’ll only write a post like this if there are major changes to the website, so you won’t see them very often.
Hopefully this has made the website’s layout a lot more eye-catching and polished but we’ll see how I feel going forward.