One of the Things I Have To Do In The Near Future

[voxwoman]

is resurrect my mother's website.

The backstory: That is one of the conditions of an eBook publisher with whom my agent's been negotiating. Since the demise of the (what I like to call) "classy" Regency in favor of the current trend for "soft-core porn" Regencies, her dead-tree publisher is not going to any effort to republish anything anymore (despite the very good sales/royalties we received from the Double Regency that was issued 2 holiday seasons ago). So, once we get the rights to the catalog back (we have some but not all of them), we will be reissuing them as eBooks.

I've been debating about how to go about this task. I'm leaning towards some sort of CMS system - maybe Drupal or Wordpress if I can figure out how to do non-blogging things with it. But I also want to incorporate SEO principles so that the site comes up high in the search engines when people are looking for Regency Romances and not just my mother's author name.

I also want to write a Wikipedia page for her, but I'm concerned about posting things like her maiden name and personal details that could be used for identity theft (since she's only been dead for 6 and a half years).

If any of you have any advice about what CMS system to use, I'd be glad to hear about your experiences. What I'd like to have on the site is a bibliography of all her novels (and other work) that is searchable by title at a minimum. It might be nice to be able to search on location, or character names, or plots/themes, but I also don't know if I want to do that data entry. I'd also like a blog interface, where I can either write stuff myself, or post some of mom's unpublished work - like greeting cards she wrote for family members, filk songs (non sf-based, but she'd been writing them since before WWII), her short fiction and possibly her old non-fiction articles. This should also be searchable (but I'm probably going to use tagging of posts for that).

Comments

[dqg-neal.livejournal.com]

I had tried setting up a Drupal site in the past... Wordpress seems to work much better for author sites. But how much of the site is going to be dynamic? I would think you'd keep the majority of the site static since its just a matter of adding things once you think of it. The blog portion is important even though she isn't around anymore. Some way to keep a community of her fans together.

Most writers bios try to stick to things writing related.