Editor's Note: I received a question from a new author who was confused about websites. Rather than answer from my limited scope, I consulted one of Pikes Peak Writers' resident experts and asked him for advice on the topic. Am I glad I did. This article is part one of a two-part series. Because it's lengthy and chock-full of information, we've broken it in two. Part two will run on Wed. March 22.
By: Patrick Hester
When it comes
to websites, most writers agree – it can be a confusing mess. I hope to cut
through that today and make it as simple as possible for you.
Having a
website is important for every writer. Nearly 60 percent of searches are now
from mobile devices –
and when someone is in a bookstore and searches for you, or your stories, or
something similar to you and your stories, you want them to find you. And you
want them to find the right you with
plenty of mentions of what you write and anything you’ve had published and
where they can buy or read those stories.
How to make
this happen? A website.
What is a website?
This may sound
very basic, but I wanted to talk for a second about what a website is. For our
purposes today, a website is a domain name you have registered, and some sort
of coded file structure hosted somewhere that resolves into a visually pleasing
display people can interact with. The two are very different and I want you to
understand that right off the bat.
A lot of places
will offer you a website for $X a month and ‘take care of all the heavy
lifting’. Not all of these sites are altruistic, and I’m going to caution you
against them. I’ve encountered plenty of businesses who make this offer and in
the fine print say that they own the domain name, website and all of its
content. This means if you decide they’re charging you too much, or if you just
have issues with them, they’ll hold onto the website name – like
www.YourName.com – unless you pay some fee to break it away from them.
Domain Names
The domain name
is what people type into the web browser to go directly to your site, or what
pops up when they do a search. It could be your name, the name of your book if
you’re creating a promotional website, or the name of your series or world. It
could also be what we call a subdomain, which I’ll get into a little further
down this post.
There are two
kinds of websites you could have as an author, and each has pros and cons
associated with them.
Blogs
Blogs are great
for authors who like to write a lot, update their fans and readers on what’s
going on, any events where they’re going to be making an appearance, news, etc.
They’re also great for keeping your name out there in the search engines when
people search for things. Search engines love blogs because they tend to be
updated a lot and offer useful information. A search engine will ‘crawl’ every
website on the Internet in order to provide results for people who are
searching for things. The more often your website has new information on it,
the more often those search engines will come back to look at your site again.
This is called ‘indexing’.
With a blog,
you can have ongoing and updated content with your Posts, and static content
with Pages. You can tie posts together using Categories and offer up a pretty
user friendly experience for anyone visiting your website.
That’s the pro
of a blog. The cons are in writing new content for it. If you’re in the right
mindset, spending an hour a week or more writing out blog content and
scheduling it might be perfect for you and not a burden. It’s when you’re not
that kind of writer that things can become more difficult. Maintaining a blog
means writing posts often enough to keep people and the search engines coming
back.
I always advise
writers to start off slow when it comes to blogging. If you write a post a day,
every day, for three months straight, you are creating a ton of content which
is great. But you’re also setting an expectation with your readers that you’ll
always give them a post a day. If that becomes burdensome, you can turn off
some readers who come to the site only to find you haven’t posted anything in a
week or two.
Start slow and
find a good balance, then maintain it.
Static Website
Static websites
are what I would call ‘old school’. These are pages created by programming code
– either by hand or using some sort of Content Management System which is a
fancy way of saying ‘website software’. The pages don’t change often, which
means search engines don’t come by very often to see if anything has changed. The
direct effect of this is that your website can appear to be ‘stale’ in the eyes
of Google or Yahoo, or the other search engines out there. A well put together
static website can look great and be a resource the search engines use, but not
come back to for another six months or even a year. Any changes you make in
that time won’t show up anywhere. You can tell the search engines you’ve made a
change, but it’s an extra step you have to take, and for every search engine
out there – which means research and time.
A good use for
a static website is as a landing page or site. As an example, you could build
one to promote your new book and leave it there forever (or as forever as you
can get on the Internet). The page would only contain information about your
book, images of the cover, and links where to buy. You can also do this on a
blog as a static page. If you run ads on Facebook, you could direct all the
traffic to this page/site to determine how well the ad did.
Sub-Domains
I feel the need
to add that there is a third option. But really more of a sub-option of the
first – Blogs. I mentioned above something called Sub-Domains. Probably the
fastest way to have a website RIGHT NOW is to sign up with a blog platform like
Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, or LiveJournal.com, to name just a few.
Why?
These sites
offer quick blogs, a lot of times for free, but with some limited
functionality. It can get you up and running in a matter of minutes, but your
domain name – the name of your website – would be what we call a sub-domain of
their website name.
Using
Wordpress.com as an example, you could sign up with them and have a domain name
of yourname.wordpress.com. You could use a limited version of the wordpress
software to build and maintain your site, but they would take care of things
like hosting and you wouldn’t really have a fee to renew. They offer more bells
and whistles if you pay for them, but you could totally have a ‘free’ website
up and running right the heck now.
Having said
that, I don’t recommend doing this.
If you’re a
writer (or business) and you want to project a professional appearance, having
a dedicated domain name like www.YourName.com is a must have. You can put it on
your business cards or bookmarks or whatever else you hand out at conventions,
book signings, etc. Adding to that an email address like firstname@yourname.com
is even better. It’s absolutely a perception thing, but one most people expect
of a professional. You went that extra step. With a sub-domain you can’t really
do that.
Many of the
sites I mentioned above will offer a custom domain name as part of their
services, which means you can register a domain and use it with their software.
That’s a way to go if you’re interested and it does work. There are usually
fees associated with doing it this way, and you should always check the fine
print to make sure you’re not signing anything away by setting something like
that up with them.
Another way to
go would be to register your domain name, then setup hosting and email
somewhere and install CMS software to manage it all, which is what I want to
talk about on Wednesday. Stay tuned.
About the Author: Patrick Hester is an author, blogger and two-time Hugo Award
Winner. He lives in Colorado, writes science fiction and fantasy, and can
usually be found hanging out on his Twitter
feed - @atfmb. His novel, SAMANTHA KANE:
INTO THE FIRE is available at all major retailers.
His short fiction can be found in the anthologies Space
Battles: Full-Throttle Space Tales #6 and An
Uncommon Collection, as well as the eBooks Conversations with my Cat, Witchcraft & Satyrs, Consumption, Cahill's Homecoming and Cahill's
Unfinished Business. His Functional Nerds
and SF Signal weekly podcasts have both been
nominated for Parsec awards, and the SF Signal podcast was nominated for a
2012, 2013, and 2014 Hugo Award. His Scrivener Quick Tips articles
exploded on social media and the web in 2012, and he’s been teaching writers
how to use the software ever since.
