Delaying a Project and a Good Review
Filed Under: My Writing, Web Design, creativity
My “pays the rent” freelance project load is such that I’m going to have to hold off on my “pipe dreams of the video game industry” project right now. I’m going to shoot to start it up in November now (although I’ll be squeezing reading in anywhere I can). It’s embarrassing to have made that post on Monday and by Wednesday have to change my schedule and plans, but as always, my first priority is paying the rent. I always seem to think there’s more time in the day than there really is. I should probably be working more on my time management skills (which really aren’t bad) before I should be working on my game writing skills. Anyway, more to the point, I’m not seeing a lot of work coming down the pipe right now, so I need to hustle some up. If you’ve been thinking about hiring me to build a website, now’s a good time.
In writing-related news, my story in Interzone issue 224 (on newsstands and in bookstores now!), “Godfalls’s Chemsong,” received a very nice review from John DeNardo over at SF Signal. I’ll take 4 out of 5 stars any day. The story is an experiment of mine to create bizzare alien biology and society using mostly real Earth biology traits that exist in real creatures. I only improvised a little bit, and I’m pleased with the results. I really should write more stories like that, but they’re a bear to come up with. But I guess if it were easy, everybody would be doing it.
Two New SF/F Client Projects Live
Filed Under: Speculative Fiction, Web Design, creativity
Two projects have gone live to the public this week. Let’s break them down shall we?
Rocket Kapre is a website dedicated to fantastic Filipino fiction. I was approached by the client Paolo Chikiamco a couple of months ago with a tight timeline. We started with a pre-built theme and worked our way from there, customizing as necessary (and customize we did). I modified the slider and many other layout aspects significantly. I also rolled out quite a bit of custom template work using the Flutter CMS tool. Any place where I wanted to add new content areas to be filled out, custom images, etc, I used Flutter to do that. We have custom write panels for the Books and the Authors entries for example. I learned a lot about building a theme setting page by working with this theme as well. Also, I really became a fan of the AZIndex plugin based on the work on this site, and have used it twice since on other sites. I owe those guys a donation.
Recently, I was brought on board as the regular web guy to implement a bunch of changes over at Fantasy. I look forward to working with editor Cat Rambo on improving things throughout the year. Our immediate goal was to redesign the existing theme in a way that uncluttered the home page considerably and added room for some advertising. I developed the featured content slider and I built on the tabbed interface from the last site design by adding some accordion work as well. Anywhere I could open up content to the editors, I did so using custom page calls and the like. For instance, the masthead information on the About tab is a page that can be edited and modified on the back end now. In general, I did a lot of code base cleaning up for my own understanding. There are a couple of custom plugins at work on the site thanks to Matt Kressel that proved very useful. Coming up will be a much more complex user system allowing user profiles with all kinds of fun custom fields. I just need to get the box upgraded to PHP 5 for that work. Some cool features coming down the pipe there.
So those are just a couple of the projects I’ve been putting the finishing touches on lately. I’ve mostly finished up at least one other site that won’t launch for quite a while. And I’ve got a couple new ones to get to work on, and some subcontracting work lining up as well.
Clockpunk Studios is doing pretty good these days! Turns out that mastering the WordPress template system has been a good career move.
Case Study: The Five Worlds Website
Filed Under: SF Business, Web Design, creativity
…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the outcome of the Making War. This is the incredible and unlikely story of how a brother and a sister, and other young heroes, created the balanced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the making. We uncover new bits of information regularly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.
Brenda Cooper, co-author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, contacted me a couple of months back, interested in how I might help publicize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.
The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young characters and an interesting setting that is both recognizable and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” science fiction, and I really enjoyed them.
From reading the books, I suggested developing a website for the series as if the site was the digital presence of an actual institution in the world. The website would provide samples of the books for reading, and an encyclopedia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.
The Academy of New World Historians is the organization responsible for assembling the historical texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of interviews conducted by these historians. The goal of the website is to share their publications with the rest of the Five Worlds.
The site is built on a WordPress framework, using a custom theme. It’s fairly straightforward in design and construction to reflect a culture that values simplicity and usability in interfaces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really interested in trying out the “expanded navigation” method that I’ve implemented on the home page. You can hover over the section titles and see additional information for the section, such as links to specific topics.
Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would recommend them even if Brenda were not a client.
Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites
Filed Under: Graphic Design, Web Design, creativity
I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m making a good chunk of my money through my knowledge of the content management system. I thought today I’d give you some background on why I’ve made WordPress my go-to platform when designing author websites.
Broad Support and User Base
WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any content management system. Why is this a good thing? Well, it means that there’s a lot of community support. It means that if there’s a feature you want, there’s a good chance someone has already developed it as a plug-in (there are tens of thousands of plug-ins for WordPress). If you run into a bug or other problem, there’s a good chance that you can find someone else who has already experienced this problem with a Google Search. This all translates into fewer hours and more features for your author website. You get more for less.
What this also means is that rather than having to go out and buy expensive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn everything I know from reading online. So I have less up-front investment (although still quite a bit of investment in mastering parts of it). Those savings get passed on to clients, ultimately.
Great Back-end Usability
The back-end of a site is the part that only the site author sees. It’s where you go to manage your content, write new blog posts, and so on. Because your readers never see this part of your software, you might be tempted to be satisfied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a computer expert, and don’t have any trouble learning new interfaces. Not all interfaces are created equal. Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-friendly back-end, but these days, it’s quite simple and beautiful. I enjoy spending time inside of the WordPress software, configuring things, and a good portion of my enjoyment is due to that.
And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress. A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress.com to set up blogs in the past. So this means you spend less time learning an interface, and more time working on your writing.
Power Theme System
WordPress allows you to configure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straightforward theme engine with well documented template tags. Through a combination of plugins, theme writing, HTML, CSS, and judicious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design concept I have come across that can’t be implemented in some fashion with the system. And using a good blank theme as a starting base, you can have a theme up and running from an HTML prototype very quickly. You dream it up, and I build it. It’s as easy as that.
A CMS, Not Just a Blog
Some people make the mistake of thinking that WordPress is just for blogs. That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days. With a few basic plugins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System feature you might want. And most importantly to authors, it gives you a user-friendly way of managing and editing that content. Rather than having to spend money down the road paying your webmaster to update your site, you can do it yourself through the back-end. It’s a win-win for you and your webmaster.
Conclusion
So those are just a few of the reasons I use WordPress. I was very hesitant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of negatives, but each one of those negatives has been addressed by the development team. Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress. Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.
If you are an author, publisher, or small business looking for a site built on WordPress, don’t hesitate to contact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design company. I am available to take new work on starting in early September. I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many budgets. We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with something basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later. So don’t assume you can’t afford it. You might be surprised how cheaply you can get up and running with your own WordPress-backed site.
