Your humble, often absent webmaster here, hoping you had a happy holiday season and new year and all that. Being a new year, I thought I would throw out a few things in regards to the state of the site and its status in the coming year.
If you’ve read any number of previous posts by me, you’ll recall that I have long intended to completely re-vamp Wellesnet over the last couple years, as the site has long needed it. Usually, nothing ever happened, largely due to my own lack of initiative in getting it done. Time is valuable, and frankly, site design takes a lot of it, most of it tedious and thankless. Plus, my skills in that arena are sorely lacking. But, having installed WordPress as the engine of the News page/blog, it occurred to me that re-designing the site was unnecessary for the most part. What I needed to do was to delete most of it.
What? I can hear you ask? Yes, having given it some thought, to my mind there is really no need to try and construct an in depth encyclopedic resource about Welles. Some pages on the site will be re-formatted within the news blog format for easy accessibility, and the main pages for Film, Theater, and Radio have been/will be simplified, with appropriate links where necessary. For the time being, most of the various images that went with each page will be mothballed; use the Wayback Machine if there’s something you really need to see. If I can come up with an easy, time-effective solution for putting them back, I’ll do so. But don’t hold your breath. Looking at the site stats, it’s clear that most of these pages don’t get looked at very often anyway, if at all. Plus, some of the pages are just embarrassing in their layout and/or outdated in their content, with material that could more easily be condensed on one central page.
One thing I’ve been proud of with Wellesnet is the various “exclusives” we’ve had, and those all remain, now found within their own section, which will be accessible from the menu bar, if it isn’t already. The Resources pages are also left relatively unscathed, since that is a useful function the site can serve. I have long needed to update these pages, and that is in progress. That link is moved to the right column as well.
With all that said, what’s next for the site? For several months, I’ve been arguing back and forth with myself over whether to keep the site running. Thanks to a generous contributor, the site will continue through the end of 2007, when my domain registration ends; before that point, it will be necessary to determine where Wellesnet goes from there, be it continue onward under me, under new stewardship, or to simply call it a day and close up shop. I will say this now, however: when and if I or someone else decides to continue it in 2008 and beyond, it will be up to users of the site to support its ongoing survival. The only means of outside income the site receives, Amazon referral money (miniscule at best), pays for maybe 10% of the total hosting fees, so the remainder will need to be found from other areas, which basically means the site users. The site doesn’t receive enough traffic to make it worth plastering ads everywhere, and I hate the way tons of ads cheapen the look of a site. As the year goes on, some means will be determined as how best to continue. It’s a little ways off, but never let it be said I didn’t warn you. The costs of hosting a site with fairly low traffic like Wellesnet are relatively inexpensive these days, so I can tell you it shouldn’t be onerous.
Larry French and Tony Rowat will continue to bring you the news and other excellent features, and just about everything else of any interest gets posted on the message board even before it makes it here. And finally, thanks to everyone who has contributed material to the site, be it information, images, whatever. This site wouldn’t be what it is without your help and the small coterie of diehards who frequent the message board. We are a small community, but a community nonetheless. Thanks again. Jeff W.