I’ve spent a lot of time over the last month updating my main website, http://danamackenzie.com, so that it will be shiny and new and perfect when my book comes out. I am now publicly announcing that the re-design is complete! If you’ve never been there, or you haven’t been there recently, please take a look and let me know what you think.
The main improvements to the site are:
- It runs on WordPress, the blogging software! In fact, it’s really a blog in disguise. This means that it will be very, very easy for me to keep it up-to-date, unlike the old site which was a nightmare. It also means …
- It’s very easy for readers to leave feedback! Just go to the “News” page, where new items will be posted, and leave a comment as you would on any other blog.
- For the first time, it’s professionally designed. The overall look and content are still my vision, but the web designer suggested lots of ideas, such as the “Gallery” plug-in and the rotating images on top of the sidebar, that I did not even know were possibilities.
- Better navigation. The old website did have a navigation bar, but it was sort of minimalistic and patched together. This one is really cool, with drop-down and fly-out menus that let you see at a glance exactly what is on my website.
Over the last few months, I’ve looked at a lot of author websites and really felt that mine was spartan and amateurish by comparison. Now I feel as if I have a site that looks professional, yet is still very much an expression of who I am. In fact, it is probably even more so now than it was when I designed it myself!
Chess players will still probably want to spend their time here at “dana blogs chess.” However, there is a chess page at danamackenzie.com (follow the navigation bar to biography > chess). Currently you can find three things there:
- A more complete and up-to-date “chess biography” than the rather dated Profile on this blog.
- An index of my ChessLectures from 2006 to 2009, with capsule summaries of each one. This will be handy for anyone who has ever tried to figure out, from the title alone, whether a lecture was worth watching. It will be a fairly big project to update the index to 2012, but I promise that I will do that when I have time.
- Finally, I plan to make a permanent repository for my best blog posts. I already have put my “Bird by Bird” series there, about the Bird Defense to the Ruy Lopez. I also plan to add my top ten blog posts as determined by me, and my top ten blog posts as determined by reader popularity. You’ll see links in the sidebar to the right when those are ready.
Please come and visit! I’ll leave you with a collage of images from the new site’s gallery.
Ten Years in Science Writing
P.S. Oh yes, by the way — how could I forget? Publication date for The Universe in Zero Words is now ten days away: April 29, 2012. It’s not too late to pre-order your copy!
