Here's a few ideas on the design. I'd rather not use a banner photo, and if I did it would be a different one. I'm inclined to go with either of the last two, although maybe different colors.
The front door was not locked and what I was about to see had been seen earlier by the person that phoned me at the Mortuary. The caller was a prominent OBGYN physician in the nearby community. As I opened the door it was apparent that there had been a fire because some residue smoke still hung in the room. Directly in front of the opened door I was able to see a TV that was on and flickering with no picture and a lounge chair beside the TV. I then stepped into what appeared to be one end of a living room. Off to one side of the chair and TV was a charred hole in the tongue and grove hardwood floor. The hole was about 3 ft in diameter and had partially burned parts of the Sunday newspapers around the periphery of the hole. On a small table next to the chair there was a bottle of half full Johnnie Walker Scotch and a empty can of Coor's beer. I went back to the Removal car and got some rubber gloves and a flashlight. (more to come}
@Ren Tanner, thanks. Don't post the whole thing here though, or the published article will simply duplicate what is here. Send it to me in private conversation.
That looks like an interesting article by @Ren Tanner. It looks like a detective story to me. I remember my husband telling me the story when he entered a mortuary by mistake. He had accompanied someone and he didn't know that it was a mortuary they were entering. There was a dead man on what looked like an operating table, naked and with the scalp pulled on top of his face. That scene was repulsive (I don't know if this is the correct term) that my husband couldn't eat properly for a week. Fortunately, that was before I met him.
Okay, I am interested in writing stories. I had not showed interest because I had not seen this post until today. I will try and put together a few stories and send them to you. From the sound of things you only want non-fiction...right? I have written stories for a few blogs but found as you say good stories get pushed to the back. Plus the stories on blogs are rated by the members themselves and that can lead to favoritism instead of rating a story on it's own merit. The fact that the pay scale lies in your hands is a fair way of deciding payment.
Okay, it's been long enough. I am working at setting this up. What was taking me so long was that I was looking to do both the directory project and this as one, and there is directory software that can be used for publishing articles as well, but they tend to do only one of them well, without a lot of time-consuming or expensive modification. So I am going to do it separately, using a WordPress theme. Since WordPress is one of the most-used platforms for web sites on the Internet today, hackers concentrate on them. It's the same principle that leads to there being more viruses and malware targeted at PCs than Macs. I have had too may WP installations hacked and I am not so good with it that I can recover from it, so I will be going with a managed hosting solution for this site. It's way more expensive but a lot easier and more secure. I have given a lot of thought into what might be able to catch on, not knowing how many people from the forum will be interested in participating, given that I won't be able to pay very much for articles. Although I will be using a WP platform, I am hoping to be able to set it up as more of a magazine than a blog. With most blogs, people will read only the most recent blog posts because blogs are, by their nature, chronological. There will be some of that, I suppose, in that new articles will be featured on the front page but once we get enough articles to categorize, I want to have articles categorized so that they can be found individually, and I want to continue to highlight random articles on the front page, as well. The problem is that there are a lot of blogs, which is why I am going to try to structure this to be something more than a blog. But still, it will have to stand out, particularly when article topics are likely to be wide ranging. One of the things that I thought of is to focus on senior issues, but I think we all like to write about things other than senior issues. Besides, what's a senior issue? Most of the senior issue sites that I see are focused on retirement communities, nursing homes, health care, and that sort of thing. I figured that if I focused on that sort of thing, we'd all run out of things to say in a short time, and if I found that I was doing the bulk of the writing, I'd run out of things to say within a couple of months. What I decided to do was use a domain name that I bought about a year ago for a blog that I was thinking of starting - 500words.online - no, there's nothing there yet. The idea of 500 Words Online is that each article will be written to consist of exactly five hundred words, no more, no less, title not included. I know that with the articles that I write, I'll enjoy the structure of keeping each one to 500 words. I think that can catch on. I'd like to open it to anyone from the forum to participate, and I'll be able to pay something for it, although probably not very much unless it catches on, and it can get some advertising. Of course, anyone who wants to participate for the shear challenge of composing an article of precisely 500 words is most welcome to do so. We should be able to pick up some advertising once it catches on. Until then, some of the advertising spaces will advertise the forum, or a Google or Amazon affiliate. You have noticed that there is no advertising on the forum, right? That will remain the case but the 500 Words site will have advertising. More later.
Not sure I understand what you are talking about. If it is something to be added to this forum and space should be a problem, you can delete all my stuff. No problemo.
No, this is a whole separate project. Although I hope it might help to promote the forum, it will be on a different server. Besides, who doesn't love your posts?