When I sat back a few weeks ago and took a good hard look at the website, I realized that I could do so much more with it visually. My first step became working on some new graphic options for links on certain pages. I'm not very graphically inclined, but I have been able to spruce things up on the Writing page and the sub pages that live under that. Go check out the Poetry, Short Stories, Essays, and Archive pages.
I also decided to put together some graphics for the Rio poetry pages as they come out so look for those as they are release. Just a reminder that the first poem from that project is about Virginia Thrasher. You can also read the blog post for that poem.
The other step I took was to simplify the website. I found that even I was confused by the direction it had taken with multiple options in the navigation bar across the top. I trimmed that down and tried to refocus on my writing which is why I created this site in the first place!
The last update I have is something that isn't visible when you visit the site. I did some searches on Google for the Outer Mountain site and was very discouraged by what I found. Searching for the term "outermountain" brought me results that didn't link to anything related to my writing until page 4, and that was the Facebook page! Google didn't serve up a link to the site itself until page 7 in their results and not until page 10 if you searched "outer mountain" as two separate words. I don't know about you, but I hardly EVER click on anything past the first 3-4 results in Google. |