It’s been a LONG time since I’ve revamped the site – six-and-a-half years, in fact! That’s the longest I’ve ever kept the same layout, by far! There are a couple reasons for this: 1) I dearly loved my Make Believe layout, and 2) I was afraid to mess up the site by changing WordPress themes. I made many customizations to my old theme, Mantra, which served me well for over seven years. But after that long, I was ready for a change and figured this was the perfect time for a revamp! I’ve spent the last two days designing and customizing a new layout, courtesy of a different theme from the the folks at Cryout Creations, Fluida. If anyone reading this uses WordPress for their website, I highly recommend the themes from Cryout Creations, as they are ultra-customizable, easy to configure, and best of all, free!
I also want to give credit to the Backstreet Boys’ amazing photographer, Justin Segura, who took all of the concert photos I incorporated into the layout. I call this layout “Starlight,” and it was inspired by the beautiful photo in the header, which was taken in Mexico earlier this year. I know many of us in North America were looking forward to concerts coming up soon and are bummed by the postponement of the tour. This layout represents where we all wish we could be!
As with any revamp, you may come across some glitches that I haven’t caught yet. If you do find a broken link or part of the site that doesn’t work right, please let me know so I can fix it. You can leave a comment on this post or contact me directly. Most of the changes I made are cosmetic – different colors and fonts – but I did have to change a few short story links for navigation purposes.
You should be able to find everything on the same pages as before, with two exceptions: I moved my two oldest collaborations, Code Blue and Phantasm, to the Dreamer’s Sanctuary Archive, where I keep all my other old stories from the pre-Broken era, 2000-2002. Unfortunately, I have given up hope of ever continuing Code Blue, and I don’t feel much of a connection to Phantasm, since it was a round robin I just contributed a couple of chapters to. You can find both stories at the bottom of the My Stories page on the Archive if you still want to read them. As Brianna reminded me earlier, there are some oldies-but-goodies among the hosted stories posted there too!
I hope you like the new look of the site! I know many of you read on your phones, and the mobile layout should work at least as well, if not better than the last one, but I highly recommend you pull it up on a computer if you can. It’s so much more beautiful there! If you do use your phone, try turning it sideways; the header definitely looks better that way. If you have any issues or feedback, feel free to reach out!
I’ll be back on Thursday with the next chapter of Heroic Measures!