Regency Author Sabrina Jeffries' New Look

by Nils T. Devine

October 2005

It all started last spring at the Celebrate Romance Conference: Cybil was sitting at a table chatting with Jade Lee about some work that Jade wanted done on her site, which I had designed following the previous year's CR conference. Sabrina Jeffries was also at that table, and mentioned that she was thinking about a redesign, but dreaded the complexity since her site had grown rather large. Cybil responded that her boyfriend (me) was a web designer and loved a good Information Architecture (site organization) challenge.

Six months later (ok, I'll admit it, I was a total slacker this summer, so not much happened for three of those months), we had hashed out requirements, agreed upon a new design, coded it, and migrated the site and www.sabrinajeffries.com was re-born.

In a time when everyone is talking about the death of the Regency for erotica, romantica, and chick-lit, it's good to know that a Regency Historical author like Sabrina Jeffries needs a new website because her old one wasn't well enough organized to handle the eight titles she is involved with in 2006. The new look of the site may employ some elements of romantica, but I like to think it still says Regency with a capital R.

As for me, it's time to take a short break and then it's back to the code – the Celebrate Romance Advanced Book Trade application needs to be migrated to a new programming language. If you haven't attended CR before, or participated in the Advanced Book Trade, be sure to read about it in the CR2004 article, or visit the Celebrate Romance website. The trade is lots of fun and a great way to fill in that favorite author's hard to find back-list.

If you're interested in having your site redesigned, drop me an email at ndevine@rakehell.com. It won't be until early next year that I can take on any new clients, but I haven't picked a next project yet. And it's not as expensive as you might think. I have a day job that pays the bills. These are mostly for fun. :-)