News About Champion of My Heart Redesign

Let’s look at why I changed everything, what I added, what I deleted, and what’s still coming thanks to the Champion of My Heart redesign. Probably the best reason for you to love the new look is that I got rid of the ad network. No. More. Ads. That means no more ad income, but I will figure out a way to replace it … somehow … I hope.

Champion of My Heart Redesign Backstory

Why was it even necessary? Earlier this year (to late to do anything about it or get even a prorated refund), I figured out that the cost of the website theme I used doubled while I was recovering from my second shattered ankle (FRANKLE) surgery in December. I knew I needed to find a free theme because smart gals don’t waste money.

That meant a total Champion of My Heart redesign, so I asked my site hosting guy (based in Europe) for a free theme that works well, and he recommended this one. It’s called Kadence.

However, you can’t just do a massive redesign on a live site this big (with content dating back to 2007). You need a staging site, BUT while you work on the staging site, you cannot add new content to the main site.

It’s a real pickle. Especially when you can’t work in the redesign all day every day.

When Years of Work Vanished

The redesign took many months because years of content “disappeared” when I turned on the new theme. Thankfully, I found a solution, but that solution meant making like 10 clicks per article for hundreds of articles, going back many years, to recover the missing content out of the old theme first.

It. Was. Tedious.

I nearly gave up and ditched the entire site completely.

Thanks to my pal Mel in New Zealand for talking me off the ledge.

Bye-Bye Annoying Ads

I persevered and overcame other technical glitches, and the new redesign is now live — without any ads.

You’re welcome.

Ditching the ad network also turned into a whole thing, with their “customer service” guy arguing with me about my negative experiences with the ads. When he asked why I wanted to leave, I told him all the reasons. And, no joke, he then called my reasons “subjective.” Riiiiight, my lived experience doesn’t matter if it doesn’t align with what you believe, tech-bro jerk!

Too many skeevy or misleading ads that I could not block
Too many ads showing up on every doggone page and making the site super slow and pretty much unusable and impossible to actually read
Me simply not making enough $ to make any of it worth it
Me being too small of a publisher to get any real help, other than through crappy forums like the one where Mr. Charming replied (only when I said I was quitting)

It cost me about $150 to tell them to stuff it, and they are still kind of threatening me with breach of contract, but I think it’s worth it. The site looks better and is much faster now. They can keep the ad money they are holding hostage, and I curse every penny of it.

New Way to Buy Autographed Books or Books in Bulk

Without creating an entire store front, which I’ve tried, is expensive, and didn’t really result in any meaningful sales, it’s hard to sell books directly. I only sell a handful of books that way, but just in case it makes a difference, I added an option to pay Via Venmo to the existing option of using PayPal. Maybe it’ll help. Maybe not.

So, in case you didn’t know, you can indeed buy:

Honestly, I think the autographed book page is my favorite of all the pages I redid during the Champion of My Heart redesign process. It’s very pretty.

heart dog surviving the loss of your canine soul mate by roxanne hawn book cover with flowers and votive candles it's on a page where you can order an autographed copy of heart dog

Deleted All Comments and Many Old Posts

I also took the drastic step of deleting all comments on the site. Several thousand comments — many from people with whom I’ve lost contact over the many years. I could only do like 100 of them at a time, so that also took forever.

I’m pretty sure that I have things set not to allow any new comments, so if you need to share anything, you’ll have to email me. People don’t really comment anymore on sites like this, so I don’t think it’s a big loss.

While I did not look back at everything dating back to the site launch in 2007, I did look at a lot and ended up deleting nearly 400 old, probably lame posts — from the days when I posted new content 5 days per week.

I cannot even image that now. I’m barely keeping up with 1 post a week anymore.

I still might go back and ditch more of the really old posts that nobody ever looks at, but we’ll see. It just felt too daunting and like it was taking forever to keep looking for things to delete.

Reliving Lilly’s Illness and Death

Probably the hardest part of doing this redesign was having to go through most of the posts I wrote during Lilly’s illness and death. That got very emotional. Yikes!

During Lilly’s illness, I didn’t know what else to do but keep going, but looking back at it day after day, week after week, month after month, I truly don’t know how I survived it. That was really something.

What Still Might Be Screwed Up

A bunch of video embeds also vanished, and I tried to insert them again when I stumbled across them, but there still might be some missing.

There are also a bunch of really old photos missing from really old posts due to a prior redesign, so I guess … whatever.

What’s Still Coming

I’m nearly done editing the audiobook version of Heart Dog: Surviving the Loss of Your Canine Soul Mate. That process, which included making our only walk-in closet into a recording studio, turned me into an audio snob. There is so much bad audio online.

That made me realize that the Dog Relaxation Protocol audio files sound terrible too, so I will be re-recording and re-posting those.

Another Redesign

My writer site also uses the old, expensive theme, so I need to pull a total redesign out of thin air for that site too, right away. It’s only like 17 pages, though, so it should not take nearly as long. Fingers crossed.

Thankfully, I did not use that theme for the website I set up for my sweetie’s biking / e-bike site that goes with his YT channel. That’s one less thing to have to redo. Though, I did realize recently that his header menu using showing up right. You have to scroll over to see the options. BUT, when I contacted the theme developer, nobody ever answered me.

Back on Track

I will do my best to resume weekly articles with timely, useful, and accurate content. Thanks for your patience during the redesign.