Location, Location

As you will know if you’ve been following this blog from its beginning, I’ve used Google Apps to host my author site since I published The Not Exactly Scarlet Pimpernel in mid-2012. It’s been great—not least because I signed up while Google still allowed people to join for free—but I’ve always been frustrated by the small number of templates available, the absence of any that strike me as truly professional, and the difficulty of creating my own. (The last says more about my deficiencies than Google’s.) So now that my books are starting to make a little money, I decided to look around for alternatives. After a bit of trial and error, I settled on Wix.com, where I have spent most of my spare time this week pushing elements around a page.

The site is not yet ready—in part because of my obsessive attention to detail, in part because I haven’t had much spare time, and in part because one of the nice features of Wix is that after I tweak every space and comma and image placement for the computer screen, I can redo the design to display well on mobile devices. After that, I have to figure out how to connect my domain name to the Wix site, a procedure that nearly drove me crazy the last time around due its pure, unadulterated, unexplained techiness. Even the thought of those CNAME registers gives me the shivers. In fact, the thought of logging in to GoDaddy for the first time in three years makes me cringe and whimper.

Maybe it won’t be as bad as I fear (and if it is, you can bet that I’ll blog about it!). The Wix support team makes the process look as simple as clicking a button that says “Connect” and specifying the current host. Let’s hope they’re telling the truth, because the instructions on correcting the CNAME register look as impenetrable as ever they did.

The last step is to figure out what happens to this blog when I move the website. With luck, it will stay exactly where it is, at least in the short term. Blogger has image-handling and tagging capabilities that Wix does not, and this template suits me fine.

For all these reasons, I expect it to be a few more weeks before I can announce that the new, spiffed-up website is ready for its public. But stay tuned. Change is on its way! 

And here's a sneak peek at the new Home page, although I can’t swear that every one of these pesky details will stay the same.