This website was a redesign for Lainie as she had made it herself with the help of her PA and the theme that they used didn’t make it easy to keep the typography consistent throughout the website. Whilst it is common for many authors to DIY their websites, many of them are just too busy writing to give a website the time it needs.
Unlike most my webdesign jobs this one did not start with an enquiry and a quote request. This job started from my extra cuticular activity (addiction) of reading fiction e-books. She came up in one of the many book groups I’m part of and posted her website. Me, being a busy body I am, looked at it and then annoyed her with messages about all the things she needed to do to make it nicer to read. Yes it was pretty cheeky of me, but I really do want people to have websites that are nice to look at and easy read.
I moved it from a free WordPress theme to a completely custom Elementor theme setup. Lainie is a very successful author with nearly 200 published books, which is a lot of book pages so rather then rework all of those pages into Elementor page layouts I coded some custom CSS so I could leave them in Gutenberg layouts and keep them matching the new pages. Using supplied assets I was able to update the overall appearance to a more modern layout with a responsive menu and a cleaner header and footer.
The funny part about this journey was that Lainie being in America and myself being in lovely Australia meant that our clocks were not the same. While she was messaging me after her day of work, I was replying to her while having my morning shower! Yes that’s right folks, I fixate on things to the point of working while in the shower. ADHD for the win?!
So here we are a lovely new website that is responsive across browsers and devices, have a look and consider grabbing a book or two 🙂
