We have started a major redesign and content refresh of the Tameri Guide for Writers. The new design focuses on the user experience. I want to explain some of the changes that are finally taking shape after years of benign neglect.
Website Design Updates
The new template uses a simple, modern layout. The color scheme remains high-contrast and we’ve increased the size and weight of typographic elements. Larger text, especially on phones, improves readability significantly.
For the typography, we chose Source Sans Pro as the primary family and Source Serif Pro for accent elements. Type designer Paul D. Hunt crafted Source Sans and designer Frank Grießhammer crafted Source Serif. We might also use Source Code Pro in the future, as these three families complement each other. Moving most to a sans-serif family of typefaces was an overdue admission that screens are not printed pages. Online, sans faces often render faster and appear sharper.
Pages load in a third of the time they did with the older design, and often even faster. The new template removes all reliance on JavaScript. HTML5 and CSS have all the capabilities necessary for a modern website. Once the stylesheet was completed, we spent time revising the CSS to eliminate extra baggage.
We know visitors hate intrusive advertisements, so we’ve opted out of most Google and Amazon advertising programs. We will continue participating in the Amazon Associates program, linking directly to books, movies, and other products when appropriate, since those links are an unobtrusive way to offset a small portion of our costs. We’ve never managed to break even via advertisements on the website or its hosted blogs, so there’s no reason to annoy visitors with pop-ups and sheets.
We’ve come a long way from the Netscape Mosaic days, with tables, image maps, and frames for navigation. The World Wide Web was a small space, with most users connecting through dial-up services.
The Tameri Guide now works better on mobile devices and large screens. The old code is gone, and good riddance to it.
New Content and Revisions
“Tameri.com,” the Tameri Guide for Writers, has been online since the 1990s. Originally, the site was an unstructured dump of lecture notes prepared for writing courses. We never expected many users to find the pages, but they did. The site was mentioned by some major publications and was an early example of edited reference materials online. I still use the pages in the courses I teach. I also want to integrate updates I’ve made to the Word and PowerPoint versions of these notes back into the Tameri Guide site.
Before colleges and universities adopted Learning Management Systems, such as Blackboard and Moodle, the website was a great way to deliver handouts to students. When I began using LMS platforms, I updated the content in Microsoft Office, neglecting the Tameri Guide. The online content has gone stale in some sections of the Tameri Guide. Some pages will be rewritten entirely, while others will be revised. The updates require time; it might be two years or so before we’re satisfied with the core content.
Blogging Update Announcements
On this blog, we will announce revisions, major updates, and new content added to the Tameri Guide for Writers. We don’t expect the Tameri website or this blog to instantly return to past glory, with thousands of daily visitors, because there are now many, many writing and editing websites. We might have been one of the first, but we fell behind the times.
If you do follow along, spread the word. The Tameri Guide for Writers is back and it’s going to get better and better over the coming months.