This website was set up in 2005. Anyone looking at the news items of the last 6 years could be forgiven for thinking that nothing ever happens; there seems to be an Event about once a year.
This is not actually the case.
The website was first set up by a webdesigner who was partial to Flash. Since I don’t happen to know Flash, the website could only be updated, with much coaxing and cajoling, at a cost of €25 an hour.
I then asked another webdesigner to haul the whole the thing over into Dreamweaver, which I do happen to know, and I asked that she not use CSS because I was not up to speed on CSS and felt my time would better be spent finishing a book than mastering CSS.
This webdesigner was partial to CSS.
It was not absolutely impossible to update the website, no, but it was fraught. (The website was, needless to say, set up in CSS.) It’s not so much that nothing ever happened; it was rare for an Event to come along which justified mucking about in the Sites folder. A professional writer is expected to be nice to people at all times; if you are dealing with an agent or editor, the last thing you want is to come to the discussion in the state of aggrieved exasperation inseparable from updating your website.
In 2007 I started a blog, paperpools, which soon had hundreds of posts; a few scraps of information floated, becalmed, in the Sargasso Sea of CSS which was my official website.
Since I now have a new book coming out, I thought it might be helpful if News were updated more than once a year. I have absolutely no doubt that a webdesigner could set up the website proper using a CMS that could be easily updated; the last time I talked to a webdesigner, though, he was champing at the bit to bring Flash back in. (A professional writer is expected, as I say, to be nice at all times.)
I’ve therefore moved the News page over to WordPress.