"Once you know what the story is and get it right—as right as you can, anyway—it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it."

– On Writing by Stephen King

This week, we're writing about our author/artist websites, which we will be designing and potentially publishing over the course of the next month. First up: the content of my site.

I've had a blog for almost a year now, one that I've actually managed to update on a fairly regular basis. I've tried to start blogs before but have never stuck with them. That said, since I've already got a blog started, I would like to try to incorporate it in some way. But that topic is better suited for my forthcoming posts on navigation and design, so I'll go into more detail in the next two posts.

On this blog, I do have an "about me" page, a résumé page, a favorites page (favorite books, movies, and TV shows), and even a page to post completed/published stories, books, videos, and other projects (which I've done nothing with, as of yet). I'm trying to think of the best way to integrate all this information into the new website or if I even want to; I'm not sure just yet. My best bet may be to keep it on the blog and use the website for something else.

In any case, I've already started playing with Dreamweaver—and even tried out a couple of designs—but right now, my favorite design uses the controversial frames method, with a header on the top, a menu on the bottom, and the content in the middle (again, more to come on design and navigation in a future post). If that's confusing, I'll try to explain: these are all in the same browser window but are in separate "frames" (kind of like picture-in-picture for the Internet).

The content that appears in the middle frame, so far, consists of a page on which I can list my published works, an about me page, and even my entire blog (with the header and menu intact, in their respective frames, which doesn't look great with the blog design but could be worse). I'm struggling to come up with more content for the middle frame of the home page, though, the one the reader sees first. As I said in a comment on Mike's blog, I would also like to include a hypertext narrative of some kind (and maybe some other stories that I've written), but that will take a lot of time and effort to (1) write and (2) implement correctly; I suppose it's something that will evolve over time, even if I have to work on it beyond the deadline for class.