I’ve just completed a cool new site makeover, as my regular visitors will have noticed. I think it looks a hundred times better, and I hope you all agree. I’d love to hear your comments.
The problems with my old site:
- Monochromatic, dark, no appealing colours or imagery.
- The home page was my blog. This isn’t wrong per se, only that new visitors learn nothing about my writing, or me unless they delve into the site.
- Text on a dark background is hard to read.
- I found it hard to match the CSS of plugins to that of my WordPress Theme.
These deficits formed the major goals of the new site, and I thought long and hard about what I wanted. Here are some considerations when you are building your first author site, or revamping your existing one.
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Technology: There are several technologies you can utilize for your site:
- Hand-code your site in PHP, HTML and CSS. This is what we all did before the fantastic blogging technologies available today, like WordPress. Not for the faint of heart, and very time consuming to build and maintain.
- Blogger, GoDaddy and other free, easy to set up site tools. Perfectly fine, but they lack the expandability of WordPress.
- Joomla, Drupal and other CMS systems. Also free, but over the top for blogging, with a steep learning curve.
- WordPress is without a doubt the way to go. It’s free, and easy to install, either on your own domain, or most of the leading hosting services, like BlueHost. WordPress offers recommendations if you aren’t sure where to go.
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Installation: Assuming that you are going with WordPress, there are more decisions to be made:
- Buy or get a free theme, and install and customize it yourself. There are thousands of themes available for WordPress, and many others available through collections like themeforest. Expect to pay $40-60 for a solid, comprehensive and supported one. Most are one-click installs and offer several screens of easily customizable options. You can build a good site this way.
- For a customized WordPress theme, with personal graphics, CSS and a unique feel, you probably want to pay a site designer, unless you have excellent CSS and Photoshop skills. Go to author sites that you like, and you’ can usually find a link to the site designer in the page footer. Expect to pay $500-$1500 or more for a custom site.
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Home Page: For best results, your home page should contain prominent content about you and your writing: your bio, picture, summary of your book(s), upcoming events, giveaways, etc. Think of it as your status page, and update it often. Put one or two blog entries below this content, or one line summaries and links to the full articles. These are the hooks into your blog, which should be on a separate page.
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Blog: Have 5-10 full-length articles on your blog page. Visually separate them with lines or boxes. Make them stand out with images and bullet lists, but resist the urge to use a myriad of fonts. One, maybe two. Where to leave a comment should be obvious. Don’t turn comments off: building a community on your site is worth a small amount of spam. Install Akismet in WordPress to remove 99% of spam. Include icons for Facebook Like, Twitter and Google+. Make it easy for readers to spread the word about your blog. Allow trackbacks. Turn on the RSS feed feature.
(A pet peeve of mine is only including a teaser sentence in your blog. If I choose to read your blog in an RSS reader, I’m not keen on being dragged back to your site to read the whole article. Compel me to visit your site by other means.)
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Navigation: You need clear site navigation at the top of the page, and a right or left rail to host further links: popular posts, recent posts, recent comments, twitter feed, etc. Look out for my upcoming article about side rail widgets.
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Categories and Tags: It’s worth thinking through your strategy (or taxonomy) for categories and tags before you blog too much. Try to limit categories to cover a wide area. Use tags as a list of useful keywords, and you can be liberal with these. Visit other sites and study how they break down their content into categories and tags.
Use these tips to build an attractive and functional site, maximized for ease of use and building a community around you and your writing. Here’s another great article to read:
Author Websites: How to make yours rock!
Now it’s all down to your content! That’s all you. The only secrets are to make it interesting, engaging and fun. Most experts recommend blogging one or twice a week, minimum, on the same days.
Do you have any website design tips to share?
