It is time to retire the old Writing Excuses website.

This site has been using the same WordPress theme since the very beginning, in early 2008, and that particular theme felt very “2005.” This means Writing Excuses is about eleven years overdue for a change, which is a neat trick for an eight-year-old site.

You’re reading this on the new theme, which was rolled out by Howard and Izzy on January 1st.

We still have a lot of work to do. The new theme exposes a bunch of pages that will be super useful once they’re finished, but it’s going to take time. Expect things to occasionally be broken, then better, then worse, then really good. But even at “really good” there will still be stuff to fine-tune.

Please be patient, and per the post title, pardon the (metaphorical) dust while we remodel.

New features include:

• Mobile-friendly design, complete with “readable text” and “nothing is missing, just scroll down.”
• RSS widgets from your hosts
• More white space for easy-on-the-eyes reading
• Prominent links for the archives, the transcripts, the books-of-the-week, and more (coming soon)
• Bigger, better tag cloud
• Gravatar compatibility

The scope of this project is limited. The new site will never be perfect, but it will never be perfect in the same way that the book you send off to the publisher will never be perfect.

“Flawed, but finished” is our goal, provided the flaws are small ones.