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.

What can interested people do to help?

Wow, the Portland literary community rocks! The emails and support have been keeping us completely inspired. One Q that's been repeated: how to help. Thanks for asking! I'll share more insight on this soon, but here's the shortlist for today:

Spreading the word. Please share this blog with folks word-of-mouth style. Once we have the doors open and an actual Web site up, we'll do our best to connect with groups in town.

Keep sharing your ideas, comments and emails. OK, this is sounding slightly referential. But this is huge for us on this side. What do writers in Portland need?

Finding a few core folks. I'll be penning fiction full time from the St. Johns location as of Sept. 15. I'm looking for a few serious writers interested in monthly or weekly desk rental. By getting in now, these writers can help shape the space. I don't have all the digits figured out yet, but something like $400/mo or so that includes all the office stuff you'd need. By sometime in October, we'll be open for writing groups, events, and workshops... really whatever the literary community seems to need.

Introducing our St. Johns Writers’ Annex

We’ve landed an amazing space for writing groups, readings, weekend workshops, garden parties, intimate literary events… and writing workstations for weekly or monthly rental.

The space is unbelievable, just over the St. Johns bridge on N. Chicago one block from Lombard. It’s a shiny new yoga studio that we’ll transform, on the same property as my brother’s martial arts school. Hence the name we’re contemplating: The Writers Dojo.

There’s plenty of work ahead to transform the location from gorgeous yoga studio to writing lab and literary workspace. Stay tuned for more details on:

• Launch party, reading, and grand opening


• Web site experience


• And the ongoing work to develop the downtown location for full a Writers’ Room

Here are a few quick pics of the main floor. Better shots of the full location and garden to come.

A NoPo Writing Annex

We're in the final stages of making a deal for our first location—the writers house annex in St. Johns. If all goes well, we will have a gorgeous, dedicated place for writing groups to meet just off of N. Lombard. No longer will groups have to do the coffeehouse, vagabond, peripatetic city trek in search of a spacious nook.

I’m reluctant to share more until the lease is signed. But things are looking superb. We’ll have a living room area to comfortably seat up to 12 or so and a beautiful, Zen office environment fully loaded for weekly, monthly, or even yearly rental. It will also be a great spot for readings and garden parties.

More soon. In the meantime, the search for the perfect writers’ room downtown continues.

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.

Please pass along to Portland writers

We need your help. Please answer the poll, shoot me an email, or just share a comment.

A writers' room: Mostly it's a quiet space with great energy for writers. I imagine an old Victorian house with shared office space somewhere close in on the East side, like Hawthorne or Belmont. It's a little funky, Zen-ed out with a garden, books crammed to the ceiling, and a living room with comfy chairs. Here established literary artists rent one of the cool offices, and many other members use the smaller areas and pay monthly dues for shared space.

Membership includes access to all office equipment like online computers and copy machines and printers, endless coffee, publications, a library, networking, discounts to events, support, and editorial assistance.

What would you pay?