It Started With a Link

I was writing a piece about an author and looking for information; oddly, I couldn’t find an author website so I was zipping around when I remembered one of my favorite resources. And there it was: the author website! So I clicked on it.

It was not the author. It could have been an author, I suppose. The woman was lovely, what I saw of her, but the suggestion that I might want to contact her for the date of my dreams made me think her profession was something besides writing.

Of course I contacted the admin of the resource website to let him know about the link. We both knew that the author had let her website domain expire and someone had pounced on it, knowing that a popular name would get plenty of clicks. It’s a despicable practice made worse by the fact that this was a children’s author and that the clicks could be from kids.

On the other hand, it would take some serious searching to find this website; it clearly hadn’t been used by the author for some time. And to be fair, the resource could have done a little due diligence, checking links occasionally to make sure that they went to where they purported to go.

So, dear writers, we come to Lesson One: Check Your Links regularly.

And you don’t have to knock me over the head with a semi-nude person to get me over to my own website to check links. (Though technically, it was exactly that link that gave me the necessary push to do something I’d been meaning to do for…oh, about three years.)

Anyway, the point is, I headed over to Cathy C. Hall and before I even checked one link, I had a brilliant idea. Namely, that I really did need to make just one or two small changes that I’d been planning for…oh, about a year and a half. Specifically, I thought I needed to make my branding a bit clearer.

So I thought, fine, I’ll just make a small change to my header. And play around a bit with modifying my landing page. And maybe just rearrange widgets on the sidebar. But then I slept on things and got up the next day and changed it all back.

Except now I had the branding bug and it wouldn’t let go. So I jumped in again and revised the header once more, and the sidebar got a few changes, too, because the widgets had to line up with the theme AND the branding revisions I’d made and whew! I was flat wore out but I felt like it was a job well done until I perused my tabs and thought those pages needed updating, too.

So I virtually dusted off the pages and got to work. And yes, I checked my links and a good thing, too, as one was in Chinese. It was supposed to be Chinese but it was the wrong Chinese link. I think. Bottom line, the pages were done and I’d come to Lesson Two: Once a job is first begun, never quit until it’s done. Be the labor large or small, do it well or not at all. Granted, I didn’t think up that lesson and I’ve had to learn it several times over the years. Including this past thirteen days.

So. I had just sighed with relief when I remembered my email signature.

Well, of course, it had to be changed, too, so that it would fit in with the new/old theme as well as the new and improved branding. And I probably don’t need to go into all that was involved with that task, but suffice it to say that the dog is not speaking to me.

So I hope we’ve all learned our lessons here; I know I have. Mostly that the next time I get an urge to check a link, I’m closing the laptop and taking a nap.

~Cathy C. Hall

Cathy C. Hall is always fishing for ideas, writing stories to catch readers! She's a children's author, freelance writer, blogger, speaker, and dog wrangler. (At least, that's what she's got slapped up on her website right now. But honestly, we all know she could start messing with things again. Probably tomorrow.)