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Tips and Tricks: Writer Websites Website Construction for WritersIf you don't think you could possibly enjoy or get the hang of html, it would be best to pay a kid at a local university to set something up for you. Depending on who you ask, this could mean something very snazzy or something kind of gimpy. Ask professors who have cool websites if they can recommend anyone. Professors tend to ask students to design their websites for them. In the corporate world, a website with a fully automated back end (where you go in and just fill out the forms and don't have to even look at the code) can cost as much as $7,000. I know this only because my husband works for a company that designs corporate websites. If you get a (good) freelance artist, it's a little less but still goes into the hundreds. My husband says that price varies a lot "depending on the functionality that the user needs as well as who's doing the development." If you get a student to do it, though -- especially a savvy computer science student -- you could get away with paying them maybe $200. (Not to cheat them, mind you. College students will do just about anything to ease the financial stress of having no money whatsoever. A lot of them would just be glad to do something, anything, to earn a little extra cash.) That is for you writers who are better with pen than keyboard. For those of you who know your way around paragraph tags and possibly an iframe or two, and who would enjoy getting a little deeper into your html, I'm here for you.
Content Make sure you have decent content before releasing your site. As a writer, I expect you to use your brilliant brain to put something up that people will want to read. For example, a profile of you. Updates on your writing career. Links to your books. (Try Amazon Associates -- they pay you if people buy something from your referral link.) Teasers of stories. Even a few free stories for people to see how good you are. If you don't have good content on your website, people will think that you don't have good content in your stories. And they won't buy them. And that's bad.
Site Reviews Getting someone to go and look at your site and give you tips is a great way to improve your design, much like asking someone to critique a story or a poem. Some people offer review sites, but they can take forever to actually get to you. Rather, ask friends and family what they think of the site -- especially younger members of the family who spend a lot of time online. Ask them to help you improve it. If you want to do a little research on your own, I'm fond of the book Web Bloopers (or try their website). I'd also recommend Don't Make Me Think. Both are highly-rated books on the most common mistakes websites make. They lean a bit toward corporate websites, but the ideas are pretty universal. - EA's List of Things to Avoid
HTML Beginners HTML Goodies: Basic HTML Tutorials: This is where I learned basic html. And if you think that my website is sitting primarily on my husband's programming and web design skills, you're sadly mistaken. He may have created an easier way for me to update, but I handled the front of the site (design, content, coding) for six long years. The layouts are all mine, in every single section, and I put them all in. My husband recommends HTML Dog. He says it's his "favorite resource for HTML and CSS for both beginners and advanced designers. Easy to navigate, thorough explanations, and great examples." Learning basic html will definitely help you if you get a pre-made layout. A lot of times, people who get snazzy layouts and don't know how to edit them properly just look stupid, because they're so afraid of breaking something in the code that they refuse to edit it at all, even the example links. And your website must look at least competent.
Intermediate This is where I am. My husband is advanced, and I'm not even going to try going anywhere near javascript or programming. But I really don't need to -- and, as long as your site will be smaller than my 400+ pages, you'll do fine without an automated system. You will need PHP Includes. To preserve your sanity. And they're actually very easy. PHP Includes
That little line of code will automatically put all the code from the text document into the code of every web page that it is on. That one line puts in everything from the text document. This way, if you want to change your layout or your navigation, you only have to do it on the .txt documents, NOT on every single page. This will save you a lot of headaches if you have more than a few pages, especially if you have side navigation and need to add or remove a link. Where I learned this: DayDream Graphics: Tutorials Alex says: "PHP Includes only work if your web server supports PHP. Most do, but if you're using ASP then you can use a very similar technique called Server Side Includes. As with everything regarding ASP, 4Guys does it best." CSS Stylesheet
Many thanks go to my husband, Alex, who added a few pertinent notes. Love! |
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