My new website is up (Version 3)! I’ve been working on the changes for a few weeks now and have some ideas that may be useful to other poets wanting to setup or make changes to their sites.
Why the new site
- I’m optimizing the site for search engine optimization so that it can rank better on search engines. This new site is more text friendly.
- I’d like to share more than just poetry as you can see in the screenshot of the new site below. I’d like to use this site as a place to share my journey as a poet, to teach things I know and am learning about poetry and to share resources that will be of use to other poets.
- I’d like to highlight more of the things I’m doing elsewhere on the web as a way of bringing all my work into one place.
- I’d like to sell books and merchandise off the site and this site has e-commerce capability built in.
- I’m developing a mailing list and wanted to make it easy for people to sign up for it.
- I got tired of the old design and I wanted something fresh ;-).
Here’s a screenshot of the new site
I capture screenshots of my site and social media platforms regularly as part of documenting my journey. I can look back upon these screenshots one day and see how my thinking and work have changed.
Screenshot of Version 2
When I built this version of the site, about two years ago now, I wanted to use images to represent the poems. So the reader wouldn’t know what the poem was until they clicked on the image. The images would therefore need to be very powerful to move people. It didn’t really work out. In the end I changed the settings so that the title of the poem would show up in an overlay on the thumbnail for the poem. This didn’t last too long as I decided to revamp the site.
The featured images for each poem were grayscale initially as I wanted the color on the page to be provided by the poem. I then changed this idea and used color images as I loved how some of the images looked unedited. With the revamp of the site I’m using grayscale images for the poetry and colored images for all the other articles.
Writer | Digital Storyteller | Web Developer
I believe that every serious artist should be able to make a living from their work if they want to and I’m on a mission to find the best tools, ideas, and resources to help artists succeed. I experiment with business models, monetization ideas, and new technology in my own creative process as part of this journey of discovering.