About All Romance Writers

A short history of the site, and an honest account of what came back from the archive and what did not.

the early years

The earliest capture of this domain, from mid-2002, is little more than a holding page. By January 2003 the site had its shape: a header promising "your gateway to romance", a left-hand column of ways to search, and a footer listing the sister communities, All, Contemporary, Fantasy, Historical, Paranormal, Series, Suspense, Time Travel and Young Adult. The copyright line credited Romance Designs, with an address on Garth Road in Baytown, Texas, and offices in Colorado and Texas.

The idea was simple and, for 2003, quite ambitious. Every book in the database carried a set of tags: the heroine, the hero, the character type, the setting or theme, the series, the publisher. Each tag became a way in. A reader who remembered only a hero called Lucien, or a story about a chef, or a Civil War nurse, could find the book. Reviews written on one sister site appeared on the others where the book was listed.

the network years

Between 2004 and 2007 the homepage grew busy. Recent reviews filled the centre column with their scores and featured authors had their own spotlight boxes. An eRomance community had joined the footer by late 2003, and by 2011 the network menu also listed Chick Lit, Erotica, Inspirational, Multicultural, Regency, SciFi and Vampire romance sites. Book clubs ran through Yahoo Groups in 2003 and 2004, moderated by Tara Green, who described herself as a co-founder and partner of Romance Designs.

By 2011 the header carried a new banner, the roses and the couple at sunset you see at the top of this page, and the navigation pointed to Eye On Romance for advertising, review requests and author spotlights. Reviews kept coming. The last homepage capture with new reviews dates from mid-2016.

what the restoration covers

We rebuilt the site from captures in the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The original ran on ColdFusion with a live database, so many archived pages are shells that loaded their content from somewhere the crawler never reached. These parts came back intact:

• 63 author booklists, from the printer-friendly and text-only views of the old author pages.
• 105 review excerpts gathered from homepage captures between 2004 and 2016.
• The Leading Ladies and Leading Men indexes and the subject index, which survived as plain lists.
• The 2003 and 2004 book club schedules, the October 2005 featured books and the publisher list.
• The reviewer guidelines and the How It Works page.

The look follows the old site on purpose: the orchid background, the black-framed white page, the crimson bars and lavender side columns, the handwritten section headings. It has been rebuilt so it reads properly on a phone.

what is new

The Writers' Desk articles are new, written for the restored archive by its editors. They are not by the original staff or reviewers and do not speak for them. Where an article uses numbers from the old indexes, the counts were made from the restored data.

Reviewer logins, book submission forms, polls, e-postcards and the crossword puzzles have not been rebuilt. They depended on the database, and we would rather leave a gap than fake one.