Query — there’s a small project I’m considering adding at the SLF, which would be helping established SF/F writers put together updated web pages. I’m noting that a lot of those writers who were in the first wave of the internet have extremely basic pages, often full of broken links. I’m considering offering a small grant to have us help update their web pages. Not adding a ton of bells and whistles, just getting it to a functional one-shot page with working links. (possibly we also host a minimal version of it on our site?)
If that goes well, we might even consider hosting memorial pages at the SLF, down the road. So it’d help if we did a bit of standardization now, built some templates we could easily convert old school hand-built-HTML pages to.
So what I’m looking for is two things:
a) Does this seem like a good idea, something useful to the field?
b) Is there a web designer (or two) willing to help us on this project at a discounted non-profit rate. I’m not sure how much I can budget for this, but it wouldn’t be much — maybe $250 / page, or $500 max. For that, you’d spend an hour or so talking to the author, figuring out what they wanted on the site (for example, do they have old stories that appeared in print anthologies decades ago, that they’d like to have available on their website for free now?), and then 2-4 hrs transferring things over, building a functional, simple page?
We can pay you separately to build a form to help with inputting the material, something like this:
Author photo:
Author bio:
Social media & Wikipedia links:
Publications:
– links to live stories
– [upload story]
Thoughts? This is a very rough idea, born of my frustration trying to find some beloved writers’ older works, would love to refine it.
