A WordPress site for author Xander M.K., designed and built in house and running on our Fictbase Pro plugin, so stories, chapters and the reading experience are managed from the same place as the rest of the site.
The project in short
Xander M.K. writes original science fiction alongside fan work, and wanted somewhere to publish it that was his own rather than a profile on somebody else's platform. We designed and developed the site end to end at Nexaces (visual direction, front end, build and deployment) on WordPress, with our own Fictbase Pro plugin sitting underneath everything to do with the stories.
The result is a dark, deliberately quiet site where the writing is the only thing competing for attention. Readers land on the work, move through chapters without friction, and set the reading experience to whatever suits them. The author publishes, schedules and organizes all of it from the WordPress admin he already knows.
What we were solving
An author site has a split personality. It is a personal site (a name, a voice, a way to be found) and it is also a reading application, with chapters, ordering, progress and long sessions on a phone. Most WordPress builds do one of those well and bolt the other on as a page per chapter.
- Stories are not blog posts. They have chapters, an order, a status (in progress, completed, on hiatus) and a genre, and none of that maps cleanly onto the structure WordPress hands you out of the box.
- The catalog is mixed. Original works still being written, like Ballad of the Erinyes and Materna Machina, sit next to completed and ongoing fan work. The site had to present very different states side by side without any of them looking abandoned.
- Readers arrive sideways. They come from AO3, Royal Road and social platforms, usually part-way into the catalog and usually on a phone. Every page had to make sense as a first page, not only the home page.
- Long-form reading is a comfort problem before it is a design problem. A fixed type size, a fixed column width and a bright background are enough on their own to lose a reader halfway through a chapter.
What we set out to do
- Give the work a home the author owns outright, independent of any publishing platform's rules or layout.
- Make reading a chapter on a phone as comfortable as reading it in a dedicated reading app.
- Let the author add a chapter, reorder a story or change its status without touching code or coming back to us.
- Keep the interface out of the way: dark, plain, and quiet enough that the prose is the loudest thing on the page.
- Stay findable: clean per-chapter URLs, feeds and sitemap entries, so search engines and readers who follow by feed can both keep up.
What we built
We built the site on WordPress and put Fictbase Pro, our own plugin developed in house, underneath the stories. Fictbase gives WordPress a real idea of what a story is: a container with ordered chapters, a genre, a status and its own archive, rather than a pile of posts held together by naming conventions.
Everything above that layer is custom-built. The theme, the typography, the dark palette and the chapter layout were designed for this site specifically, then built onto Fictbase's templates so the author gets the plugin's behavior with none of its default styling.
Because the plugin is ours, the build was never a matter of finding something close enough and working around the gap. Where the site needed something the plugin did not yet do, we changed the plugin.
What it does
- Stories with chapters, not posts. Each story holds its chapters in order, with clean per-chapter URLs and next and previous navigation at the end of every one.
- Reader controls. Light, dark and automatic themes, adjustable text size and adjustable column width, so a reader sets the page to their own eyes once and keeps it.
- Pick up where you left off. A story remembers the chapter a reader stopped on, so the story page offers to continue rather than starting them over.
- Progress and pacing. A scroll progress bar on each chapter, and automatic word counts and estimated reading times on the story pages.
- A browsable archive. Filters by genre and status, a search, and tag pages, so in-progress originals and completed fan work can share one catalog without confusing anybody.
- Scheduled releases. Chapters can be written ahead and released on a schedule instead of published by hand.
- Feeds and sitemaps. RSS for readers who follow by feed, and sitemap entries so individual chapters are indexable.
- The rest of the site. Home, About, Stories and Contact, plus the outbound links to where the author also posts, all built as ordinary WordPress content the author edits himself.
How we built it
We started with the reading experience rather than the home page. The chapter page was designed first (line length, type scale, spacing, the dark palette) because it is the page a reader spends the most time on, and every other page on the site exists to lead there.
From there it was built as a custom WordPress theme. Fictbase Pro supplies the story and chapter content types, the archive, the reader controls and the templates; the theme overrides the presentation of all of it. Pages, navigation and the author's own copy stay as standard WordPress content, so nothing routine needs a developer.
Design, front end, plugin work and deployment were all done in house at Nexaces. Having the plugin and the site under one roof meant each fix landed in whichever layer actually owned the problem, instead of being patched over in the theme.
Where it stands now
The author publishes on his own terms. A chapter is written, scheduled and released from the WordPress admin, and shows up on the site, in the story's archive and in the feed without anybody else being involved.
Readers get something that behaves like a reading app rather than a blog: pick a story, set the theme and text size once, and move through chapters without being pulled out of the page. There is no account to create and nothing between a reader and the next chapter.
And because the stories live in the author's own WordPress install, the catalog is not tied to any platform's rules, layout or future. Whatever happens to the sites he cross-posts to, this one stays his.