I recently received a notification from somewhere in my social media memories that I launched this website, TheresaHuppAuthor.com, just over seven years ago, in February 2017. I posted in mid-March of that year about what I’d learned as I developed this site.
Seven years feels like a generation in the internet world. Maybe two generations. Pondering what has changed in WordPress in seven years got me thinking about what I’ve changed in my site since it went live.
Not a whole lot, it turns out.
The biggest change has been to add a page for each novel as I published it. When I launched the site, I only had two historical novels published. Since then, I’ve published four more. And now I’m working on the seventh and last book in the series. Through the years, I’ve also tweaked the “About Theresa” page and added information about the books.
I also have edited and changed several of the other pages, sometimes to add information, sometimes to delete. Most notably, since the pandemic, I have focused little on in-person events, so I have reduced the emphasis on this as a marketing avenue. I’ve tried to add interesting pictures on the “News & Events” page as my writing career has progressed.
In the future, I’d like to update the whole look and feel of the website. It is beginning to seem dated to me. But I’d rather be working on my current novel, so website changes are not a high priority this year.
Although I will update the site at some point, I am limited not only by time but also by my rudimentary technical knowledge. I can find my way around in WordPress fairly well, but I struggle with the back end of running a website—the hosting side. I know very little about the workings of my host site (Bluehost), and it’s painful to have to figure things out on the fly, as I did when Yahoo and Google changed their authentication requirements for email newsletters recently.
Also, I chose a theme (SiteOrigin’s Vantage) and page builder seven years ago, and the WordPress world has changed a lot since then. My new posts use the new WordPress block editor, but some older posts still use the old SiteOrigin page builder, and I worry about how they will translate when I update the site. Figuring all this out will also take time and require some work in Blue Host to set up a test site.
For all these reasons, readers are likely to see this site relatively unchanged through at least 2024.
Are there changes to the website that readers would like to see? If so, please post them in the comments.
