Reimaging a Web Presence: HOWL Society
I recently volunteered to help update the HOWL Society website and social media presence.
It happened back in March, when HOWLS read the book One’s Company, by Ashley Hutson. We loved the book, so I thought, why not bring her in for a question and answer session? I email her and pitch the Q&A, a live chat on Discord for about an hour. We’ve done this with so many cool authors, like Tananarive Due, Paul Tremblay, Victor LaValle, Gwendoline Kiste and Grady Hendrix. I mean, we’re a horror community, but we’re very polite company.
I steered her to the website to see what HOWLS was all about, and I got self-conscious. The website hadn’t been updated in a year. It was still advertising the Kickstarter campaign for their last anthology, HOWLS from the Scene of the Crime, which had ended ages ago. The book had in fact been published and available for nearly a year. What was I doing, asking an author to judge us on an outdated website? A website that had no information on the awesome interviews we’d done with authors in the past?
The HOWLS social media presence wasn’t much better. It was generally on message, but the posts were inconsistent and had gone fallow for a while. No shade on anyone, it was a team effort by a lot of people who were volunteering their time.
So I volunteered, joining with another HOWLS member, the fantastic Rebecca Karas, to update everything. She had similar thoughts as I did about doing something more with the website.
I’d never used Wordpress before. I want to say it has an awful interface. There was a time I enjoyed coding my own websites, a hallmark of Gen X / older Millennials, but websites are can do so much more these days than html.
Like I mentioned, HOWLS already generates fantastic content. Not only is the book club active, but the members are getting published, editing anthologies, running podcasts, doing great things. Rebecca and I wanted to plus that content with original interviews and articles. In March, for National Women’s Month, we ran a feature with interviews a couple of women horror writers. In April, to coincide with National Poetry Month, we’re featuring the five nominees for Stoker’s Award for Superior Achievement in Poetry. Let’s make Horror Poetry Month a thing.
HOWLS is more than a book club. It’s literally a horror-obsessed club. HOWLS consumes and creates horror. Diverse horror, thoughtful horror, genuinely scary horror. And so many horror-adjacent things; like Ashley Hutson’s One’s Company, which was about obsession rooted in trauma, but not horror per se.
The website isn’t perfect, but it’s getting there. Our first goal is to generate content, and make sure the socials are updated regularly. We don’t want to direct people to a fallow website, or have stale socials. The next goal will be to redesign the site, maybe moving off of Wordpress. Keep building a base. Come to HOWLS for interesting horror content!
Mostly, I’m having fun while doing this.
