Kerry Allen

If you hated the way it looked… sorry, that hasn’t changed much. However, on the two computers I’ve viewed it from, which vary radically in speed and quality, it loads much more smoothly (in IE, anyway). (Yay, auto-optimization!)

Most of the improvement was in ease of building, prompting the following unsolicited endorsement: Web Studio kicks ass. I didn’t have to use a single bit of code in the whole site, including formatting the text (much of which was copied and pasted from Word, formatting intact) and even *gasp* stays where I put it on the page! If you need or want a web site, can’t afford to have a professional do it for you, don’t know squat about HTML or CSS, but have content and can arrange elements on a page in a pleasing manner, you’re qualified to use Web Studio. You even get a free 30-day trial to play with it.

So, if you have nothing better to do sometime, pop over to my Domain of Delusion and look for broken links and general fugliness. There’s a link at the top of every page that will take you to the “whip it into shape” blog entry if youse has complaints.

Edited to Add: Actually, looking at it on my work computer, the text does NOT stay where I put it, shrinking to teeniness and leaving huge, gaping holes underneath. Mother pus bucket.

I’m not even going to try Monday, Wednesday, and Friday blogging for the rest of the month. I got nothin’.

I downloaded a 30-day trial of Web Studio. I had only an hour to play with it, but it seems like a fuller-featured version of WYSIWYG drag-and-drop web design for morons. For instance, you can enter a descriptive tag that will pop up when you hover over a link (merely neat), and it WILL center the page on any size monitor (huge improvement). I’ll have to get deeper into it before I know for sure, but it’s looking good so far.

To combat my mehs, I picked up a book. Within the first few pages, the heroine was sexually assaulted and beaten within an inch of her life. Um… no. I’m not usually squeamish about stuff like that (the details weren’t even provided), but now is not a good time, thanks. My weary brain craves something fluffy. I need that Jennifer Colt in my TBR or a Stephanie Plum marathon. Now that I think of it, I have an Aisling Gray’s latest ludicrous hijinks and mayhem in the pile, too. If all else fails, I can read something kiddy.

I maintained word count on WL on the latest edit despite the added info. (Die, speech tags, die!) Time to put it away for a couple weeks before another readthrough and get it back out there, which means it’s (drum roll, please) Query Letter Time Again! The most frustrating six sentences one will ever write. The new formula: hook, setup, disaster, disaster, disaster, resolution. I can fill in those blanks, but there’s no flow from one to the next, so it sounds choppy and disjointed. I can write two-thirds of every sentence, but the last bit of every one gets limp and soggy.

Where are the freakin’ voices in my head when I need them?

I have laboriously collected from the internet a list of reader advice for creating an effective author web site. I have tried to implement as many of these qualities as possible into my beta site. Feel free to visit anytime and find fault. Anything that can be improved (broken links, poor visibility, tooooooo slooooooow, whatever) before it becomes important is a good thing.

Following is the reader advice I have collected. If you have additional suggestions, please share them in the comments section.

See the rest of “Beta web site”