"You're so helpless- like a baby hyena." Does that mean when I grow up I get to gnaw your leg off?

[thanate]

This week has been a lot about puttering around making self-watering planters to go on the porch, planting the latest batch of native woodsy things my mother brought me from her yard, and painting trim (after a couple days of sunning the trim boards which grauwulf cleverly weighed down to keep them from warping... right at the edge of the porch where they got rained on & started to mildew.) I've also found myself sitting on the porch with my eyes half-closed contemplating the sunshine and high 70s weather; in another couple months I'm liable to sit around with my eyes drooping closed because it's too hot to think, but thus far it's pretty lovely.

The story I'm working on at the moment seems to be coming out of my head in segments of under 100 words, which is a bit frustrating, as I find I would like to know what's going to happen in it.

Meanwhile someone (possibly marthawells?) linked to this article on having an online presence as a writer. While this is something I'd more or less had on the list to get around to sometime (possibly with far more exciting digital format mouse novels than I currently have the technical knowledge to create), I'm slightly disturbed that at least one editor apparently finds it offensive to discover that an aspiring author doesn't have an online presence. Really? I've been poking around (more on this in a minute), and could name you several authors who haven't got websites of their own, though admittedly by the time I know of them, they have things that turn up in google.

So, having got off on a bit the wrong foot from feeling ordered around, I went off to re-examine various existing author websites, and the thing that stands out about them is that they're all very wordpressy. Even the interesting ones, with neat background graphics or whatnot, are very much header over info box with sidebar and/or menubar tabs. Very functional, easy to navigate, but very much exactly like about half the internet. (the other half being graphics intensive and/or ad infested) And my little contraryartistic heart starts whining that this is terribly boring, and surely there must be some better way to express information that nobody else has thought of yet. Unfortunately, I haven't thought of it yet, either.

(Does anyone else have favorite author pages, or anything else pages for that matter, that look a bit more interesting without falling into chaos?)

In the mean time, I put up a token effort here, which doesn't turn up on google (yet) either, and is probably about as much help as nothing, particularly since I am an idiot, and managed to let my one publication thus far lapse from the internet, so I'm going to have to reformat it and put it back up myself. (er... they said "let us know if you want us to keep your story up past the 1 year mark" and I said "oh, I should do something about that... when I'm done making all these Christmas presents" and forgot all about it. This is why I now have a writing-specific e-mail account.)

Mainly I just needed to whine about this while my back brain works out half-considered images; could I just work out what exactly I want such a thing to look like, I could hand it off to the resident web expert. (quick quick, before he gets accepted to grad school...) But if anyone has any helpful thoughts or suggestions (on interesting web design, on what *you* want to see from an author website, etc) I'd love to hear them.

Comments

[heuchera.livejournal.com]

There's something to be said for being "intuitively" (because it's like all the other websites we know) navigable and boring. Obvious category links/tabs, a functional search box, and clean enough appearance that I can find those things, are important to me. Don't know as that helps you much. Good luck getting webbed!