Back up and running

January 24th, 2010

OK, we’re back up and running at a new site mwamidwest.com.
Don’t worry about updating your links though, when things finally are settled both .org and .com will point to this site.

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Our new MWMWA website

January 15th, 2009

Welcome to the new Midwest Mystery Writers of America site!

This site uses free, open-source blogging software called Wordpress and features a theme originally created by some folks affiliated with a place called shinrahouse (http://www.idsg.it/). There’s links at the bottom of the site to these places – specifically the little icons on the bottom right.

I’ve hacked the theme a bit, most obviously to add the Edgar in the upper right corner. I’ve also added the links across the top as well. That’s so the calendar feature will sit at the very top of the right-hand side.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me explain how all this fits together, because the structure of the site will help explain how we’ll use it.

Across the top you’ll see four links, down from five on our old site design. These are links to pages that, for the most part, are not meant to change much over time. But we want the information available on the site.

  • Home. That just brings you back to the main page, no matter where you are on the site.
  • About MWMWA General information about who we are and what we do.
  • Links Kind of takes the place of the old author links and resources page, and gathers links from other pages and puts them in one place. There are some changes, though:
    Members of MWA can have a free listing page on the main site, and so we didn’t want to duplicate their efforts.
    You’ll also notice that we didn’t include links to some sites that are on the old site. That’s on purpose. It’s not because these aren’t legitimate or useful – far from it. It’s because the board will be working on a new policy on links. So for now the links we have on the new page go to some places that MWMWA is actively involved with. One last note about links – this isn’t the only spot on the site that will have them. We’ll also have a blogroll that works just like any other blogroll. That will need to have some criteria as well, but likely less stringent than our “official” links page.
  • Mentor program We’re highlighting our mentor program on its own page.

What do we do about the meetings and events pages from the old site? Well, two things will replace them.

  • The calendar This is a really cool little widget. Very easy to update and it has it’s own RSS feed. We can put meeting dates on there months in advance – same with events like Love is Murder or Bouchercon.
  • Blog posts Hey, this is a blog. Let’s talk! We’ll use blog posts to give details about upcoming meetings and events and report on them afterward as well. There’s other things we can do as well, such as remind people about deadlines for our mentor program.

And that’s it. Try the place out and let us know what you think.

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