I Did It? (Author Site Update)

My free Blogger website had a lot of issues, some of them out of my control (still). I've never been happy with its look, but like any tiny change one contemplates making to a configuration, things could easily all go to hell. That's why I never played around with my Blogger theme. I had a utilitarian one and just stuck with it.

I can never replicate a professionally designed site; not with my current tools, but I definitely could improve it. And I believe I did.

Blogger doesn't offer much variety, but because it's free to use, it doesn't have to. It's been years since its theme selections were expanded. I'm on Blogger every day, so I would have noticed. However, I did manage to find one that's a huge improvement over what I was using.

Here are the issues that needed fixing:

1. A bland white screen background. I've never pulled up an author site that was white, and while I'm quick to critique other sites' designs, I apparently was too oblivious to notice my own failings. 

2. 3-D book mockups that consisted of a real-looking book (as opposed to a flat image), but that were surrounded by a big white square. Even with my white screen, that big block stood out and looked cheap. For most of my sections, I'd gotten rid of the mockups all together and went back to flat images.

3.  Spacing that's all over the place, and thus text formatting that looked like a blind man did it. (More on that later.)

4. A home page that just wasn't "right", but I didn't know how to make it so.

 

My new theme is dark grey over light. It definitely looks more elegant. I chose a cream-colored rose as the background image, which is subtle. I like it, but I'm wondering if I might try something different. To me, though, the design conveys "peaceful", which is how everyone wants to feel, right? 

Somebody somewhere online had once recommended a particular book mockup site, something I'd never even thought about. (But I never thought about a lot of things.) That's the site that encases a book cover mockup inside a big white square. I actually hated the results, but I figured it was the only free mockup site around. It seems, though, that my Canva subscription is good for endless types of creations, and I stumbled upon its mockup templates only by accident. Theirs don't ruin the book cover by landlocking it. It's just the cover ~ WAY better. So I converted all eleven of my covers to mockups; then had to replace the flat images in every section with the new mockups.

Which brings me to the spacing issue. If you look at my BOOKS section, you will find weird spaces between books. Those cannot ~ trust me; I tried and tried ~ be rectified. If I backspaced to leave less space between each book, Blogger would suddenly underline the titles, and there was no way to undo that. I tried deleting the titles and retyping them with correct spacing, and Blogger would mess up something else, such as deleting my new mockup covers. I tried changing the font size, I deleted the mockups and re-inserted them. Finally, I had to admit defeat. 

(Also, asking Blogger to left-justify text only works sometimes, which is why some of my titles have unwanted indentations.) 

While I'm talking about text, with my new grey background, some of my text showed up white and some black (?) Of course, I wanted consistency, so I had to change the black to white. This is great, except in "compose mode" the screen's background is still white, so I had no idea if I'd spelled the words right without highlighting them (wherever I figured they were) and checking. For some reason, white on white is invisible. 😉

As for my home page, well, there's not a lot I can do with it. The expert I read said to keep the homepage simple, and I agree. No one wants to pull up a site and be confronted with a lengthy dossier. So, it's still got the scrolling snippet from my professional review, then my new book mockup, then my subscribe (LOL) box. 

One issue that bothers me is that my site is http instead of https (secure). When I first bought my domain (from Google) and applied it to my site, Blogger informed me that https was not available. Now it says it is, but if I try applying it, then opening the site in a different tab, I'm told the site cannot be found. Some people are bothered by unsecured sites, and I would be, too, if I was going to enter my credit card info or other personal information. But I'm not asking anyone to buy something; just to read. And there's nothing I can do about it anyway.

Overall, I am 96% happy with my changes. As for the other 4%, I can eventually tweak some more, but the things that are outside my control will, unfortunately, remain.

Take a look here 

I should have taken a "before" screen shot, to show just how bad the previous design looked, but trust me, my author website almost looks professional compared to the original version.

And it's done wonders for my psyche.