Making Things Simple Around Here

Well, the website redesign is done now.
The dust has settled, anything that was going to be tweaked was tweaked, and I’m pretty happy with the result.

It’s simple.
It’s plain.
It’s kinda zen.

It looks like something that a draftsman would come up with on their drawing board.
It reminds me of how Japanese calligraphy masters can tell whole stories with just a few strokes of black ink on a white page.

The old design, I think, reflected my egotistic need to sell things.
The new design, I think, reflects my renewed dedication to one thing: words.

In the beginning, I wanted the website to at least be self-sufficient, to pay for itself, and maybe a little bit more, through various schemes, such as Ad Sense or affiliate programs.

Being self-sufficient led to me making hundreds of dollars each month like some bloggers, and then making hundreds of dollars led to daydreaming about making thousands of dollars, and it was just an endless spiral of coding and search engine optimization and other marketing crap that I have literally no interest in.

But that gets to be tiring and trite.
You become a salesman rather than a novelist.
You become a tap dancing frog in a top hat rather than a wordsmith.

You brainstorm blog entries based on how many links they might generate.
You pick photos to go with those blog entries, based on how they might look on the page, as opposed to focusing on what you wrote.

The pictures are gone.
The Google ad sense is gone.
The affiliate program ads are gone.

This is literally, me, stripped bare to the load bearing walls that are holding the structure together.

And I think that’s a good thing.
The redesign has allowed me the freedom to delete a lot of content, get rid of the extemporaneous, the personal, the useless.

It both forces and allows me to focus on what is important: the series.

I thank you for your support, your kind words, your taking Denton and Monty into your lives and putting them on your bookshelf.

If you like what I’m doing buy a book.
It’s that simple.