Naturist Fiction Archive

Slight Site Restructure

Letters : 2620 Words : 468

By: The Administrator

I made some changes to the structure of the site, now that I know a little more about how the site is actually used

When I first launched the site, I saw it as a future community of multiple writers submitting their stories live with discussion forums and lots of comments.

The number of visitors and especially the number of returning visitors who subscribe to our RSS feeds is very encouraging. I consider the naturist fiction archive to be a major success.

Sure, it's still a niche site, but the logs show that as soon as a visitor as read more than two or three stories, they tend to stick around and read most of the rest over the following weeks.

However, since the launch, the only new story published not written by me has been "The Same Place" which was mostly downloaded in PDF format from the Loxie and Zoot webcomic it is a spin-off of.

Slowly, it became more and more clear that while I would still welcome new stories from other authors, I would be responsible for most of the content.

The Author Resource section, which was the right of the main menu, became useless as most of the visitors are readers, not authors.

The idea to hide behind the site as a simple impartial administrator there only to moderate the quality also appeared useless.

As a result, the "Author Resource" section was moved to the "Introduction and Resources" tab, and the site news were moved in it's place, more easily accessible.

I also decided to create a "Blog" category where I placed my past articles about my life and for which I hope to write future blogs.

I still hope that other writers will contribute to the site, and if they want, they'll be able to post blogs as well, perhaps with their own page.

But in a world where it's easy to just have it's own free blog, I fear that the original mission of the Naturist Fiction Archive (imagines in 2005), is slowly fading away as a simple repository and is more or less a personal website of my writings.

I would prefer otherwise, but after 6 years, I think it's time to face the fact.

As I come to terms with it, perhaps it will help my writing. Instead of leaving doors open for other writers, I'll try to cover more ground and venture in new areas.

I'll also post details on my writing journey, so my readers can understand what I am going through and see the reason between the differences in quality in different stories, such as between the quickly written Eden's Creek and the more planned and deliberate Catherine Reynolds chapters.

I hope you'll appreciate it, after all my goal is still the same: help make the building blocks of free naturist online stories which are respectful of our lifestyle.

---