An author's website (what you need to know)

For any author who is taking the publication and advertising of their new (or existing) book seriously, then having a website is a must. This is in an era where self-publication is the ‘go to’ option for thousands of authors every week of the year, with so much competition, you need to do something more in order to stand out from the crowd.

But for many authors the thought of creating a website fills them with absolute terror, for a start you may still be under the impression that a thorough knowledge of coding is needed in order to develop a site yourself, or if not, you’ll need to pay a website developer thousands to create one for you.

Rest assured, you only need a little bit of creativity and imagination to build a website yourself, in some cases you can even have a new website up and running in an afternoon. So where do you go to start your new author website?

Well the internet has a great choice when it comes to ‘build your own’ services, many will start for free (although you will face some restrictions) and go up to around $25 per month, the more expensive options tend to be for those who want to open an online store and use the site for business.

So here we have a list of five of the most popular website building platforms (and in no particular order):

1. Weebly.com – A great choice for those who have never built a site before, Weebly uses drag-and-drop to add items to your webpages, they also have a whole host of additional apps which you can integrate into your site and offer real-time stats (to see how many people are visiting your site too). Blog gives a nice feature to automatically share your posts with your social networks too.
2. Moonfruit – With an improved interface this platform is easy to use and again offers some great features for the first time website maker, the blog is a little cumbersome to use. Offers great value for money and includes several email addresses for each website you create.
3. Wix.com – One of the most popular choices of website platforms, this offers lots for the user and you’ll only need an email address to get started for their free version, prices then start from just over $4 (to use your own domain name) and go up to $25 for their VIP service (again aimed more towards business use).
4. Godaddy.com – Their Godaddy Website Builder starts at $5.99 per month for the basic package, this doesn’t include a mobile optimized site (which could hit your rankings on Google) their other two packages do though ($9.99/$14.99). Again, easy to use with lots of templates to choose from and lots of storage space.
5. Squarespace – This is also a very popular choice of website builder, although a little more complex than some of the others, it offers beautiful templates, lots of analytical tools, responsive for both desktop and mobile, it’s an incredibly elegant service with prices starting from $5 per month.

There are of course many other companies offering this service to anyone who needs a website, but for the author you need to ask yourself what is important when it comes to your website?
 
But there are several key elements that your site should contain of course, these will be:

1. Home/Landing page – The first thing that your viewer will see, they’ll make a very quick decision to either stay and look further or click the back arrow button and leave. It should be intriguing and encourage your viewer to hang around.
2. Mailing list – Ideally (although we all hate them) a popup asking your viewer to subscribe to your mailing list, in order for this to work you HAVE to offer something of value to the viewer, it could be a free chapter of your latest book etc.
3. Catalogue – A page dedicated to your currently published books, a little about each one and of course links as to where they can buy a copy.
4. News – Here you can let your readers find out what you’re up to and any publishing dates or events.
5. About – People like to know about the person behind the book, so have a bio page (with a photo), don’t go overboard with it but make it light, you want your readers to connect, remember, people buy from those they like.
6. Blog – In order to keep your website current and to engage with your audience a blog is an absolute must, just remember to use it a least once a week.
7. Contact – Have an online contact form where your readers can get in touch with you, also provide links to where they can connect via social media (just ensure you use your author social media and not personal ones).

Having a website is a great way to connect and at the same time get your message out there, building a mailing list (as any promotional expert will tell you) is also a very important element to your growth but should also be treated with respect, people will come back  to your site, blog and mailing list as long as you avoid the consistent ‘hard-sell’, give them something which is informative and interesting.