Holly Y Felmlee

The site for a Colorado novelist and historian, carrying four books, two running blogs, an events record and a weekly Patreon photo series.

What they came with

Four titles sit across three unrelated genres: two Constitutional Convention mysteries written for children, a play adapted from a Ukrainian folktale for children to perform, and a collection of short stories and essays. Two blogs already had their own homes and their own long histories, one of them a transcription of a Civil War diary handed down through the family. Events run from a winter market to a conference booth years earlier, and a photograph of the Blanca massif goes out to Patreon supporters every Friday. All of it had to sit under one masthead and stay editable by the person who writes it.

What the build had to do

Books as their own record type

A registered book post type gives each title its own URL under /books/, plus a blurb, cover treatment, rating and buy link, so the catalogue grid and the detail page read from one record. The difficulty is that the four titles do not belong to one shelf, and the template has to seat a children's play beside an adult short-story collection without flattening either.

Two blogs under one masthead

The two running columns are WordPress categories dressed as publications: each carries a standing description, a header image and its own archive, so a term behaves like a title rather than a tag. Both also have long-running lives on Blogger, so the site had to present them as continuing work rather than as a fresh feed.

An events archive that keeps its past

One archive holds two states. Upcoming markets and readings run full width at the top, then everything already done sits underneath in a two-column grid, each entry with a date and a photograph. A 2017 conference booth and a market still to come are the same record shape, ordered differently, so nothing has to be deleted to stay current.

The Friday photo and Patreon

Friday Mornings at the Peaks is a gallery of Blanca massif photographs placed directly under the Patreon call, so the thing being supported is visible at the moment the ask is made. Images open in a Fancybox lightbox rather than routing anyone off the page mid-scroll.

The series gets its own page

Discover the Series introduces the two Constitutional Convention mysteries book by book and character by character, then closes with the two standalone titles, while every book still keeps its own catalogue entry. A standing button in the header carries it, so the series is one click from anywhere on the site.

Technical detail

A hand-built theme, no page builder

The templates are classic PHP under /wp-content/themes/holly_Y/ with their own style.css and responsive.css, Bootstrap 5.0.2 for grid, Swiper 11 loaded as a web component for the autoplaying carousel, AOS 2.3.1 for scroll reveals and Fancybox 5 for the gallery. Nothing sits between the template and the markup, which keeps the served home document near 38KB and the render path short; the trade is that layout changes are template work rather than drag and drop.

Term meta for the blog headers

Category images are stored as term meta and set through a theme-registered media picker, js/category-media-uploader.js, which opens wp.media on the category edit screen and writes the attachment id into a hidden field. This is the boundary that decides who can change what: giving a taxonomy archive a designed header becomes one click in wp-admin instead of a developer ticket.

Commerce stays off the site

Each book record points at Amazon, so there is no cart, no checkout, no payment surface and no stock state to keep true against a distributor. The consequence is that the site cannot observe a sale, so the two signals worth building for are the outbound click and the Patreon subscription, and the templates make those the clearest actions on any page.