After giving it a lot of thought (and noticing a lot of websites out there with much nicer designs,) I’ve decided I’m going to give my website a new look, hopefully within the next week or so.

For the most part it’s just an appearance overhaul, but I have some ideas for possible additions to make the site function a little better as a way to advertize my writing. Mainly, I’m not a fan of brown, and I don’t think it fits me or my work very well. I went with it initially because I thought having a brown “coffee” sort of look would seem more literary. And some people like that. Personally, though, I’ve always been a fan of cooler colors, like blue or purple, and I wanted to try something that utilizes that, maybe a darker theme.

So, I’ve already put in a little work finding a new theme to work with, and trying to set it up in a way that looks nice with my very limited knowledge of CSS/PHP. You can see a mockup here:

I may change the background, depending on whether or not I think it’s too distracting. The fonts may change too, and the menu bar still needs a little work. I’m currently trying out the theme on a subdomain I set up for testing, and once it’s ready I’ll transfer it to the main site, so I don’t have to worry about taking anything down while I’m messing around with this. Right now the biggest problem is getting it to appear and work on phones and tablets.

As for new ideas I might add to the site itself, I’ll probably add more to the sidebar, maybe something for links to other websites, or a more prominent display for whatever my latest publication is, or info about what I’m going to publish next. Might also set up a page where I talk about current/future projects, and give status updates on what I’m working on.

I will probably overhaul the character page as well. I wasn’t entirely sure if I should keep that section; I know some people like to form their own ideas of what characters look like and don’t like pictures, but I know other people are very bad at visualizing characters from writing and like having a visual aid. (Which is why I set that up in the first place.)

But, looking at some other author websites I guess some of them do have character sections, so I’ll probably try to expand on that a little more, maybe have a menu page that links to mini-bios with pictures if I can find the time to draw them. I may also add a gallery for artwork if I feel I have any pieces I want to display. Not 100% on that, though. I’ll worry about the other things first.