Website redesign

One of the more time-consuming tasks of a midlist mystery author is to create and maintain a website promoting his books. In the last year folks have suggested I hire a professional web designer for that job. Of course it was their gentle way of saying my two-year-old self-created site was lame-o, lame-o and needed a thorough redesign.

While the old site didn't have the exploding-scoreboard ambience of some of the fancier best-selling author websites, I didn't think it was that bad, just mildly serviceable. All the same, over time I came to view the home page as cluttered and clumsy, and a few days ago decided to do something about it. I wanted to make the new site as open, airy and simple as possible, something Mies van der Rohe might have approved of had he lived into the Internet age.

And I didn't want to spend anything on it except time.

The first thing I did was to use Photoshop Elements 10 to create a .jpg banner illustration with a photo the Lady Friend took of me a few years ago and add the name of the website in Charlemagne, the same shapely and elegant font used in the original site, finally tying title and illustration together with a rule.

Next I used free website software called KomPoZer to combine the foregoing banner illustration and a strip of page buttons to make a page template that would serve not only for the home page but also all linked pages.

On the home page I added another .jpg illustration promoting my book Zephyr, and made it clickable through to a page with full information about the book, including where to order the Kindle and Nook ebooks.

Finally I added a strip of links under the Zephyr .jpg to help readers find the ebooks of my novels.

The website still won't win any prizes for breathtaking elegance, but I do think it's not too shabby for an amateur with only a rudimentary knowledge of HTML coding.

Go have a look at it.