A Farewell to CSS

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A Farewell to CSS

Regular visitors may have noticed a few changes around here lately. First of all, I moved to a much smarter WordPress theme (called, rather splendidly, Hemingway). Less obviously, but considerably more significantly, I’ve added a new item to the menu: Books. See?

The thing is, I used to have individual sites for all my books. This went back to the days when I was running the Mrs Darcy serialisation on its (her?) own separate blog, with its own url, www.mrsdarcyvsthealiens.com. When publication loomed, I thought I’d have a go at creating a striking promotional website for the book, using hand-crafted CSS/HTML, and the end results weren’t too bad, if a little amateurish.

I hated using raw CSS/HTML, though. OK, I’ve done programming all my life, but laying out a web page involves a load of other visual skills that I don’t have. You may have noticed that I kept using the same template for every single other book website I produced. I also tried using it for a website that Mrs P asked me to do for her, and this was the point at which I realised that I needed to find another approach.

I then had a blinding revelation: just go with WordPress. OK, there’s no capability for fancy stuff, but for a site that’s purely there to give out information and – most importantly – is easily maintainable, it’s very hard to beat. Want to add breadcrumbs? There’s a plugin for that. Want to add redirection? There’s a plugin for that. Want to add Facebook page likes? There’s a plugin for that. And so on.

So I threw together a WordPress site for Mrs P in no time and she was very happy with the results. I moved on to my business website and re-wrote that too.

Then I thought, why not get rid of all these individual book sites and merge them into my main writing site? So that’s what I did. And what fun it was too – I’d forgotten how many Mrs Darcy specials I’d written, for one thing. It’s so nice to have everything in one place.

Do have a look around. There’s loads of stuff to keep you occupied for hours. Here’s the sitemap (oh yes, there’s a plugin for that too):