In the brief space between my travels to Moscow and Italy,  I spent an intense few days redesigning the Storynory site.  We had a naive child-like design before - appropriate to children, as it was meant to be.  But now we want to build some relationships with serious people, so we thought we need something more slick.  It’s a hard balance to strike.

I went for a static front page - so as to give more explanation to new visitors as to what it is all about.   I still get a lot of emails from mums asking how they can download stories for their children - not to mention those who want to know how to subscribe to a podcast.

I wanted to use the latest Wordpress feature for a static home page - but I found that it’s incompatible with Extended Live Archives.  After the home page, the Stories Archive is the most visited page on Storynory.  Stories never go out of date, you see.

So the static home page is generated by HTML, copied and pasted into a WordPress template page with the slug “home.php”.  It’s crude but it works, and it loads fast too.  I actually generated the HTML with a WordPress Page, then clicked “view source” in the browser and copied it.