Web architecture, design and development is my profession, so it’s only fitting I write a few words to cover how this site is managed.
Whilst it crossed my mind to build a mini content management system for this site, it struck me that would involve more procrastination when I should be writing (fiction that is, not code). For now I’m manually writing the pages following a template, but there’s nothing dynamic about this site apart from the email form. When I need to do updates, it’s a job for search and replace. And you know what — that’s working out just fine!
I switched to using Blogger to maintain the tales on this site. It’s great because it manages all the navigation for me and best of all, it supports comments. I always wanted to let people make comments on this site, but never got around to coding it, so this will work out very nicely!
I’ve kept the design clean and simple, and headings light, so the focus remains on the text. I’ve picked a large font size (yes, it is a fixed pixel size) for easy reading on the screen — of course you can print if you prefer. Georgia is the font specified for the text, and Stonehenge Regular is used in the logo (with the greek letter shadows in Symbol). It took about 8 months for me to get over the minor tweaks and settle with this design as something I can be happy with for an extended period.
Navigation has been kept simple so as not to distract from the tales, nor overwhelm with useless choices. Each tale will have previous and next links along with a chapter menu. An index of all tales published will also be maintained — that’s the closest to a site map this site offers.
I’m not a professional writer — nor editor — but I have tried to get the punctuation as accurate as possible. Hopefully all the dashes, quotes and other fancy marks are where they are supposed to be. It is difficult to remember to put them in sometimes, and a bit of a nuisance they aren’t on the keyboard. Still, working on it …
All pages on this site are built for standards compliance in XHTML 1.1, CSS 2. UTF-8 (Unicode) is the character encoding of choice, particularly useful for the special punctuation characters used throughout.
This site should be accessible in any browser; optimised for fast downloads; and rank decently in the search engines. If you want to know more, or you find any problems, let me know.
