CMS Websites for Writers

For about 5 months we've been chatting with Web programmers and designers to offer inexpensive CMS websites, custom designed, to come in under or around $1000. If you're familiar with Content Management Systems and high-end Web design, you probably understand our challenge to find a highly qualified team willing to help us in this price range.

We wanted creative time with amazing designers, a creative brief session, and then 7 or 8 pages to start, with the ability to easily add pages at will, and the sites needed to include such options as: easy-to-use point and click CMS, all the basics like home, about, and contact forms, secondary navigation features, gallery for photos or streaming media, blog, events calendar, mailing list sign up... All the stuff writers might need.

We talked to programmers involved with Drupal, Joomla, Windows .NET, XML, PHP... The price tag always ran North, up, up and away to 2K, 3K, 5K. It's the CMS connected to custom design that makes it so expensive. Occasionally we found a programmer willing to help, but only for one site. (We want to help many writers.) But then the reality of no money set in... we have a project manager, designer, and programmer for each site... Then we discovered roadblocks and shortcuts taken. Not good.

Just when all hope was lost... We have discovered a solution! Our friends from an amazing and powerful and successful Web shop, the sort that works exclusively with large corporate clients and budgets to match, have agreed to help support our writing community. They are extraordinarily generous and though we have just started this endeavor together through a beta launch phase, we are grateful for their positive energy, experience, advice and support.

If you need a site and you understand the value of what we're talking about here, please drop a line. Let's chat. Our goal here is to just provide an awesome resource. Once we get fully up and running, we'll also have lots of free content and ideas for writers and Web development.

ready to launch

Thanks for the Qs on our radio silence. We've been behind-the-scenes, working hard to keep the core training alive by writing daily. Meanwhile, the business side of Writers' Dojo continues to develop, to provide core members with outstanding resources. In just a few days, we'll launch a new WritersDojo.org Web experience. It's a good start, including a free podcast download with bestselling author Chelsea Cain.

Off line, we've been furniture hunting, to outfit the Dojo with beautiful office gear. The redesign continues. Painting, artwork, desks... Here are a few of our finds. Special thanks to our friends at ECOpdx for the salvaged wood masterpieces.

it's official

today we became bona fide. numerous brainstorm sessions, several legal conversations and the first offical expense with three digits later, the biz side has landed. we are: the writers house llc

happy birthday writers house.

we're eight days into this project, averaging roughly four new hits a day on the surveys and--after the initial friends and family responses--about 10 new, interested people a day via email. that's good news, spreading word-of-mouth style. more to come, including some launch party news for later in the fall.