Sherrie Flick is a writer and a co-founder of the wonderful Gist Street Reading Series. Her first novel, Reconsidering Happiness, will be published this year. In preparation for marketing that book, she needed a website — one that would showcase her published works and promote her other endeavors.

We felt a blog would be a good addition to the site. It would show her friendly and down-to-earth personality and style, and it would help the site rank better in search engines. But Sherrie wasn’t sure blogging would be right for her. She likes to focus her writing energies on her work, and the idea of placing her personal life online made her uncomfortable.

So instead of a standard-issue blog, we designed a template that’s like the mini-blog format used by Vox and Tumblr. Each entry is a simple photo with caption or a single sentence, so there’s no requirement to write a multiparagraph post. Unlike a miniblog though, we left in the tools for commenting, and we set up a style for a long post in case she ever does want to write a full post.

And the site and blog are all built in WordPress, so she can create new posts and manage her site within a single place.