A New Home on the Web

I’m so excited to have a brand spanking new website that just launched this week! Savanna Kaiser did a beautiful job making the site coordinate with my newsletter design and the colorful book covers my husband has designed for me. Here’s a little sneak peek:

Isn’t it pretty!? If you click on the image, you can link to the whole website, but first, let me tell you the history behind my website’s “evolution.” Many of you know that I started writing in order to help put our kids through college while still staying home with the little “oops” baby that the Lord blessed us with when our other kids were 14, 10, and 8. My first contract with Bethany House was a huge answer to prayer, with the advance on royalties for a two-book contract being to-the-penny what we’d been told our oldest son’s four years of college—room, board, and tuition—would be at the state college he chose.

The Internet was fairly new when I first started writing, but by the time Tarl got his degree in Commercial Graphics, I was a published author who needed a website. And Tarl had the skills to design me one. Sadly, neither of us saved an image of that first website (at least not in a format we could access twenty-five years later!)

This is one of my favorite photos of my firstborn and me, taken about ten years ago when he was home for Christmas.

After that website, I cobbled one together on the Blogger platform and it served me (mostly) well for many years.

A few years ago Ken designed a really pretty site for me that we again jury-rigged to work as a website.

Unfortunately, blogger has become more and more uncooperative over the years (it was never really designed for traditional websites in the first place) and I knew the time had come to update mine.

Savanna and me at the ACFW Conference a few years ago.

Enter my friend, Savanna, an award-winning author and talented web designer along with her husband. I’m SO happy with the results! A fresh new look that I don’t think I’ll get tired of for a long time!

I’m curious to know what type of content you hope for when you go to an author’s website? What are you looking for, practically speaking, and what are your favorite just-for-fun features. Please share in the comments below—and then I hope you’ll hop over to deborahraney.com and take a gander!

P.S. For those who are newer here, you may not know that our own Robin Lee Hatcher does fantastic web design as well! It always kind of blows my mind when God gives writers multiple talents!