Well, sometimes things just don’t work the way you need them to anymore, and this website was no exception. I hadn’t updated the theme in over five years, and I wanted to make use of it to do more than just serve as the home base for an occasional blog post.
I’m working on some projects — books, actually. The first, probably the first two, actually, will be compilations of my favorite essays from the past five years of writing at 1P5. I looked at my stats and I’ve cranked out over 1200 articles in that time, and only a couple dozen look like they’re going to make the cut.
I realized, though, as I was thinking through how I’d be marketing them, that I don’t really have the kind of homepage that serves an author. And as I do more different kinds of projects, I want a website that can handle all of it.
I think this new iteration of WordPress, which is built on a heavily-customized theme that allows me to visually edit the components, is going to make it easier for me to keep things modular so I can add and remove sections to the homepage as needed.
For now, it’s somewhat bare bones, but it’s 1:30 AM and I’ve been at it all day, and I wanted to get it copied over so I could get more content up this week without having to constantly back up new posts to my staging site. I figured I might as well put the thing up.
There’ll be some kinks to work out, but no better way to find those than to have people use it. I know that the sidebar on the posts is ugly, and I need to figure out how to fix it. Hopefully all the forms are working. I haven’t tested them.
I think it’s a solid step forward over the old site, though, and I can keep building from here. Thanks for your patience if you run into any issues.
Steve Skojec is a husband, father, storyteller, writer, and podcaster who dabbles in photography, filmmaking, and graphic design. His commentary has has appeared at outlets such as The New York Times, Foreign Policy, USA Today, The Washington Post, Fox News, and The Washington Times. He lives in Arizona with his wife Jamie and their many children.