The Crusie Website: A Saga

Many years ago (about thirty or so) I was in grad school and they told us about this website building program called (I think) Home Page (maybe) and suggested maybe we should build one. So I did. I used Mucha’s “Medea” poster as a visual starting point because I loved the colors and because it always struck me as funny (I really like my brother, so it wasn’t that) and because I knew nothing about designing websites, but I really liked the finished project, and. when it was done I considered myself finished with web chores forever. I had a website, didn’t I? Then one day, in a fit of responsibility, I explained publishing to my daughter on the theory that she’d need to know how that insane business worked if I got hit by a truck and she had to deal with my (very few at the time) copyrights.

Which was the last time I had any control over my internet empire (one website, one blog, the occasional Facebook page).

My daughter has been terrifyingly efficient since birth. I swear, I sat there in the hospital with her in my arms, gazing at her adoringly, and she gazed back with skepticism and resignation, as if she recognized then that this was the maternal card she’d been dealt and she was going to have to make the best of it. So she took over my website, asked me what I wanted it to look like and designed this peppy diner-looking place that pretty much summed up my early romances. Anybody remember this?

She also put up the Cherry Forums, so those same checks were all over the place there, too. I loved that website design. It was so . . . ME.

Time passed, I moved into single title, and it was decided (I do not remember by whom) that the website needed an upgrade. I had MANY ideas, mostly visual, and Mollie found this great web designer, Joelle of Moxie Studios, and I loaded her up on visuals and said, “I love collage,” and then went back to writing books. When Joelle sent her first pass at the design back, it wasn’t anything at all what I’d wanted when I sent her the visuals, but it was exactly perfect. Even today, so many years later, I’m still stunned by how exactly she captured the way I felt about my stories. It was dark, it was funny, it was dramatic, it was weird, it had an upside down monkey, it was GORGEOUS. I still love that website design. (Stripped down versions of that website design below.)

But time keeps passing, and websites are built differently now, and mine was basically a steam engine in a world of electric cyber trucks, so it was time to revamp. And in addition, we’d had to take the site down at one point and half the posts weren’t available any more on the blog and the gorgeous visual was now stripped down . . . yeah, it was time. So we went back to Joelle and now I have to figure out what I want the new place to look like.

The first problem is that I really love the old website. Really, really love it. So the first couple passes were based on the old one and I knew better, I really did, you have brilliance like Mollie and Joelle, you let them do their thing, so I was kneecapping them.

The second problem is that I know what I want in book covers and website design, but I don’t seem to be very good at getting it across. I love the book covers we got for the Liz/Vince books and Rocky Start, but those designers have no desire to ever work with me again because I became tactless (I truly am sorry about that), and I definitely didn’t want to do that to Joelle. But two passes and we weren’t close, so Mollie and I talked on the phone for a long time while she tried to figure out what I wanted (bright, colorful, fun, off-the-wall, fluid, non-genre-specific, St. Lucy, a goldfish, the monkey, world peace . . .). We took a trip down memory lane with the old iterations of the site which made me remember Medea from my first website, and I made a small color board and e-mailed her that while we talked about what bright, colorful, fun, off-the-wall, fluid, and non-genre-specific meant to me.

The fonts above are from Joelle’s design and we love them, so they stay. The typewriter and fish are from the Linnea collection so we can’t use them on the site, they’re just there for color and image reference for the idea board. But the real revelation was the Medea poster. Those colors just seem like something I’d write now. The light background, the drama of the complements, plus those staring eyes–St Lucy with her side eye, the goldfish with its huge eyes, the monkey with its terrifying eyes and then Medea with the insane nuts bonkers eyes (gotta love Bernhardt)–I said, “We need Medea back, if only in the colors,” and Mollie said, “Yes, I believe we do,” and that’s where we are now.

I mention all of this because there’s going to be some remodeling in here since Argh will match the new website, plus there will be a newsletter which will have nothing in it that’s new for you all since I share my every waking thought with you, so this is just to let you know that there will be hammering and dry wall dust in here along with a new paint job and some very fine programming behind the scenes that will make everything work much better. And we’re keeping the monkey. If you have any suggestions, hopes, fears, or general input for this blog or the website or for the newsletter (yeah, I know, I already asked that one) feel free to unload in the comments. In my spare time, I will be going back to the almost four thousand posts here (no, I am not kidding, 3,794 posts, of which 2,107 are still in draft form from the Great Reorganization) and sorting out what goes where and making sure they’re all tagged and possibly linked. You know, when I’m not writing books with an insane Green Beret who’s still bitching about two spaces after a period even though he puts apostrophes in plurals.

Where was I?

Right. Big design changes coming right up. You have been warned.