I haven’t been using this site to promote my new book Shibai: Remembering Jane Britton’s Murder, but I’m going to do it today.
I had a basic site up at shibaithebook.com (the link points to the new site) but it was awfully basic. Years ago I made some simple sites with hand-coded HTML. Then I graduated (if you can call it that) to Apple’s iWeb, and then to Adobe Muse, which of course Adobe then stopped supporting. I didn’t want to learn Dreamweaver.
I like Muse, but it’s dated and doesn’t have many tricks (or, to be fair, I haven’t found many; maybe they’re there). Probably the main reason I like Muse is that user interface and structure resembles Adobe InDesign very closely, which for me has been a big plus. I spend a lot of time in InDesign (my count of books designed for various publishers is pushing 50, since 2013) and that’s made working in Muse intuitive.
Here are some of my Muse sites:
I think they’re all acceptable sites, but for one thing, they don’t work very well on mobile devices — and these days, that’s a drawback. Plus, although it’s possible to do photo carousels and the like, I don’t think they work very well.
Enter Squarespace and Melanie Lindauer, a web design person that Ruth Thompson put me in touch with.
We decided on Squarespace. Melanie and I got to work — I supplied text, images, audio, and video which she then worked into the site you see.
It was fascinating, not least because I never had to worry about the technical details. I’d put up a video on Vimeo, or audio tracks on Soundcloud, and Melanie would weave them into the site.
So, for example, if you go here you can listen to audio that I extracted from the two long Zoom video events that I did (you can watch the videos, too, if you like).
She was able to embed video. Here’s a clip we never found a place for.
So, finally, I’ve got a modern site. I don’t know whether I’ll get myself up to Squarespace speed and use it for the other sites. Saddle Road Press is a candidate, but that site’s actually complicated and might be too hard for me at the moment.
Check it out!