So How Do You Like The New Place?!

Not to be redundant but welcome to the new Leviathan Chronicles Website.  A lot of you that follow Leviathan on Facebook know that this new site has been in the works for a long time (more than 6 months) and really signifies a new age for Leviathan as we wind down Season 1.  This new site was pretty much designed from scratch to be much more user-friendly for both you AND me, but still retain some of the best visual elements from the old site.

In the design process, I really wanted to make the site a regular destination for more fans and also create better vehicle for me to communicate more often with all of you.  Believe it or not, I often found that I had news or thoughts I wanted to share but I didn’t have a great place on the site to post it.  Now there are two blogs on the site, and host of other cool features.  Let me walk you though some of the highlights.

-       The Dossier:  In two words, eye candy.  This is the area to get more expanded information about the people, places and things within Leviathan.  All of the artwork has been custom created for the website based on the storyline.  Within The Dossier, you have a Characters Section which are data files for each of the major Characters.   You also have my personal favorite area of the site, Artifacts.  In this area, you can view illustrations of the different objects within the Leviathan universe, like the Condor or the Vesper class fighter ships, and learn more about their origins and design.  Lastly, you have the Map Section.  Obviously, one of the great pleasures for me in writing Leviathan is transporting the listener to exotic far-flung locations around the world.  Some places I’ve been to.  Some places I’m still dying to go.  The Map section gives you the locations of the major scenes in Leviathan and brief descriptions of the area and its importance to the storyline.  The key thing to understand is that this area will be updated frequently as the plot progresses so stay tuned!

-       Community:  This area is one of the main reasons I had the site redesigned from scratch.  This is essentially the old Forum Section of the site where fans can communicate with each other (as well as me) and serve as a central point to exchange theories, ask questions, and generally hang out.  The old Forum was plagued with unreadable small text, tended to be glitchy, and was cumbersome to add comments.  All of that has changed.  I’m really looking forward to the conversations that we’re going to have.  So please LOGIN and CREATE A PROFILE!  I may even drop some hints about Season 2….

-       Loot:  Many of you have been asking where you can get Leviathan T-shirts and other cool swag.  So far, I’ve only given away limited numbers of Leviathan T-shirts at appearances at Comic-Cons.  Now, there are 5 main product lines that you purchase from: Leviathan Logo, Hail Mary, Blackdoor Group, Salty Squid and Leviathan Defense Unit.  I designed the graphics on each shirt to look as realistic as possible.  The Salty Squid shirts are inspired by some of the beachside bars in Nantucket.  I want you to feel like the Squid is real place and these shirts will have everyone asking when you last visted the Mariana Trench.  The Blackdoor shirts are the actual training T-shirts given to recruits at their secret training facility in Virginia (and not allowed to be taken off-site, but we stole ‘em anyway).  The Hail Mary shirts are actually worn by Tulley and Oberlin.  They had a whole bunch made for when then they actually discovered the Elando Cortez and could hire some more crew but…well, you know how that turned out.  And lastly, the Leviathan Defense Units tees feature the Leviathan Flag on the front and their Unit’s logo in the back.  These are actually worn within Leviathan so I thought we should have them here as well.  I hope you guys like what we’ve created here.  Buy it, wear it, and when people ask you about it – tell them to check us out!

-       Graphics:  This is under the Loot category but we’ve created an awesome section to download some really kickass wallpaper to help you keep a little Leviathan love on your screen in between episodes.  Also, I’ve included a CD graphic that can be used to create your OWN professional looking Leviathan CDs.  This works for people with printers that can print directly onto CDs or for the rest of us, just buy some CD stickers from Office Max or wherever (like here).  Run the sticker sheet through a normal printer and then adhere the graphic right on to a blank CD.  Easy stuff, seriously.  This CD makes an killer FREE GIFT for someone who might not be familiar with podcasting or mp3 files or maybe just wants to pop it in their car.

-       Subscribe to the Blogs:  Obviously, you’re reading one now but you can also Subscribe and get the latest news whenever I post it.  Click on the button in the upper left.  You can Subscribe to either my personal blog or the Leviathan blog or both.  The blogs were a really important feature for my to include in the new website build because I wanted a way (outside of Facebook) to stay in touch with fans during the period between episode drops.  I plan to be pretty active here

-       Tell a Friend:  This is a really important feature and I really hope you all will take advantage of it!  With this feature, you can just enter a friend’s email address, and we’ll send them a prewritten email describing The Leviathan Chronicles and a copy of our trailer to Season 1 so that they can hear some of the audo magic we create.  It’s easy and we do ALL the work for you.

There’s a lot more on the site so I invite you to check it out, explore, and tell me what you think.  I’ve really tried to incorporate a lot of people’s earlier comments about the old site (too Flash based, too long to load, bad for folks outside U.S., etc…) so I hope the new site will be viewed as an improvement.  My highest priority is creating a cool site that you all like coming back to and will inspire new people to listen to episodes of Leviathan.  Thanks guys!