Constructing your Own Site

One of the topics I meant to touch on in my last posts was what you need to do to make your own web site.  Making a web site for an author is important because it lets you probably information to readers about your work.  This is very important for marketing your stories.  You can also use the site to let readers know more about yourself and to promote all the way to contact/follow you.

In general, you need the following items when creating a web site:

Content (what each page will talk about)
Navigation (what will you call each link; will you use menus)
Design (what will each page look like)

Let's start with navigation first.  You need some links and you'll need text for these links.  These are the categories of information you will provide in your site.  You shouldn't have too much.  Nine or less is good.  Five is even better.  If you find you need more, you might need to group a few together can provide some menus in your navigation.  That makes it much more difficult; providing menus means including a script of some kind.  Such scripts can be found on sites like Dynamic Drive.  But if you aren't really a coder, try to keep it simple and avoid the need for menus.

Note:  I am a coder and I will eliminated the use of menus in my site.  A word to the wise.

Once you have the categories for your site, you can probably write or collect the information you need for each page.  We are writers after all.  You might need to spin the information so it has a more marketing twist (I sort of suck at that and had to rewrite some of my content several times; I'm still not happy with it).

Lastly, the design.  There are two parts to this:  one is fitting your content into the pages.  That's not so hard.  The second is determine what your site will look like.  Obviously, you need design skills to do this and knowledge of HTML and CSS so most authors will need help with this.  There are templates you can use which are predesigned.  You can find them on the web.  (I'm assuming here you already have a hosting location; if you don't or don't know what that means, read on pilgrim).

Another option is to sign up with a site that simplifies the whole process.  Such sites host your site (give you a place to store your site on the Internet) and provide simplified templates for you to use.  The tradeoff here is you lose much of the power of the coding the pages directly.  But since you probably can't do that (or you'd have used a design template) that's not a big loss.  I've seen several author sites with Wix, web site builder.  And while I'm sure the authors who made them are happy with their sites, I wouldn't be because the sites aren't especially interesting, at least from a design perspective.  One might say the same thing about my site but I'm working on that.

One last thought:  Obviously this post is just a high-level look at making your own web site.  If you want to go deeper, you'll need to study HTML and CSS if you don't know these already, and web design.  You might want to hire a designer (I know a really good one, so ask if you want her services), or you might decide to do want I did initially, make your blog your web site.  Whatever you do, good luck with it and make it the best site possible.  Your readers deserve nothing less.

Building a Web Site

About two weeks ago, I blogged about Amazon's review policy.  How they do not let authors add reviews from other sources so that all the reviews of a book are in once place.  To help deal with that, I decided it was time to rethink my web site and really build it out.

Up to now, I've been using a single web page I created for Aure the Topaz and this site (my blog) in a joint effort to get out my information and my message.  I decided to move away from that and build a web site to handle everything, except this blog.  Instead, I settled on using the RSS feed from the blog to display the latest five entries on the home page.

My main goal with the site was to provide a location where I could collect all my reviews.  I realize this is not ideal but at least it will give me and my readers an alternative to Amazon's one-sided reporting.  After all, Amazon is not the other book store and I receive comments from folks who read the book independently of Amazon.  So if you want the full picture, you'll have to go my web site.

Determining the content was easy.  I had already done most of that work.  I'd need a page about me, a home page, a page for books, a page for my short stories, and a page for my poems so you can see all the kinds of things I write.  I also decided to include information about the world in which my fantasy stories are set.  This include a map, some background, and a glossary.

Pulling the site together was harder.  I think this is where most writers (and most people in general) have problems.  They don't know the technology that makes a web site work and they don't have the patience or time to learn it.  Fortunately for me, I ran a small web site consulting service in a past life.  So the technology and the coding of the pages was not the issue.  The issue I faced was the need for some scripts.

To start, I realized that I needed a script for handling the comments I planned to post.  I also found I needed a script to open flyout menus in the navigation I planned to use.  I ultimately backed out of that when my design changed.  And I needed a script for handling the blog RSS feed.

As it turns out finding these scripts on the web and implementing that was straightforward enough, but as the site came together, it didn't look good.  Especially the home page.  It was flat and didn't grab me.  So I rethought it and looked for author web site template that might be available.

These templates gave a few ideas on the design to use.  I wanted an image of me (so you know what I look like) and my name had to go in the banner.  The navigation I decided could be just a line of links and the home page should show the book and stories available along with the blog feed.

Suddenly I realized the point of the site wasn't to give you information about me so much it was to sell my work.  Suddenly cover images began to appear on the home page and the site came together.

I'm still tweaking it a little and I'm not happy with the color scheme but these are minor points.  It is up and working at http://feitelberg.net/aglaril/.  Take a look and let me know what you think.