I was forced into changing the design of this site a few years ago when the little piece of software that controls its appearance was no longer supported. (Rats.)
This turned out to be a good thing, because it made me think hard about what I wanted on my site. I mulled over what helps or irritates me on other people’s blogs and websites. (A blog is just a type of website that has new content added regularly. They’re all websites.)
I had to update both this site, which I write as a publishing consultant & editor, and my author site at belindapollard.com. I discovered things that are relevant to both authors and editors, which is why I decided to write this article for both!
I make no claims to having achieved perfection, and I’ll keep on tweaking my sites. But I thought I’d share my learnings with you in case you’re looking to start a website/blog, or update one. It might give you a headstart.
We’ll look at:
- The platform I’ve chosen
- The 7 ingredients
- A behind-the-scenes look at the basic toolkit I use for my own websites.
Choosing a platform
This website is created using WordPress, a type of free software that is adored by search engines (leading to better traffic stats), and also very powerful in terms of the many different ways it can be customised.
I’m no techie, but I drive this website myself. I am a Webmaster [insert canned laughter here]. Yep, once you clamber up that initial learning curve, WordPress is so simple a trained monkey or a Belinda Pollard could use it. 😉
If you are already on a different platform such as Blogger et al and you love it, I wouldn’t be changing, because there’s few enough hours in the day as it is. But if you’re starting from scratch or not happy with what you’ve got, may I suggest: Go for WordPress.
The 7 Ingredients I will suggest here apply to any website on any platform (even though I can only tell you how to implement them in WordPress).
Ingredient 1: A search window
This might seem a trivial addition, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve torn my hair out when trying to find an article I KNOW is on a person’s website, but they have no search function available.
Why does it matter?
The reason I’m looking is often because I remember reading an article there sometime in the past, and I want to link to that article in a blog post I’m writing. That’s not a visitor you want to frustrate! People who provide deep links to something useful or interesting you’ve said on a particular page of your site are pure gold for your search engine credibility.
There’s also the obvious benefit if a reader (for authors) or potential client (for editors) is trying to find out more about what you’ve said on a particular topic.
Author/blogger Molly Greene was surprised how much her stats improved when she added a search function to her homepage. (And, incidentally, I found that post to link to by using her search window!)
So, supply a search window to increase the chance of both beneficial connections with people and valuable backlinks from other websites.
For WordPress users, most themes have one baked in, and you only have to activate it. Mine is at the top right of my site when you’re viewing it on a computer or tablet (on a smartphone, it slides to the bottom of the page). I found it in Appearance > Widgets and dragged it across to the top of my primary sidebar.
(BTW, if you have encountered the No Search Window frustration on someone else’s site, a techie friend of mine revealed how Google can help. Let’s say I was searching for “kittens” on yahoo.com and they didn’t have a search window thingy, I could enter this in Google search…
kittens site:yahoo.com
[That’s a colon between the word “site” and the website URL.]
Voila! Google delivers all occurrences of kittens on Yahoo. Good, huh?)
Ingredient 2: A navigation system
It doesn’t necessarily matter what it is, so long as you supply a structure for people to find their way around the best material on your site. This becomes especially important if you have a site with lots of content — information that people are always referring to.
Even if you have the simplest of author websites, we still need to be able to find your books, your About page, and your contact details.
Otherwise your site becomes like one of those houses on the television shows about hoarders, where there’s not even stepping room between the piles of stuff. How can people find your treasures if you don’t give them a pathway?
It might be:
- Menus at the top
- Menus at the side
- Boxes in the sidebar with lists of your recent posts
- Lists of your popular posts
- Lists of your categories or tags, so that articles on particular topics are grouped together
…or all of the above!
When we have these navigation systems in place, we increase the chance that a casual visitor will stay a while, and look at more of our pages.
Why does this matter? Apart from the obvious human-connection benefits, search engines rank our sites partly on how long visitors stick around, and how many pages they look at. Longer visits + more pages viewed = a better chance of being discovered by readers/clients.
In WordPress, I found my navigation items here:
- Menus: Appearance > Menus
- Lists of categories and popular posts: Appearance > Widgets (drag the appropriate widget to your sidebar and choose the display options).
Ingredient 3: Links to your social profiles
You’re probably active on at least one social network (or soon will be). Make it easy for people to find you.
Many WordPress themes have this baked in. Mine has it under Appearance > Widgets. I just had to enter the URLs for my social profiles, and then drag the widget over to my sidebar. (I also changed the colour, but that’s just because it’s my business colour.)
If your theme doesn’t have one easily available, go to Plugins > Add New and search “social profiles”. There’ll be lots of options there.
I also added a couple of other social thingies:
This one shows a counter. Some people see the number as adding credibility, so I just go with it (even though I actually think many people can have a very useful Twitter presence with a small following). I got the counter from these guys: http://twittercounter.com/pages/buttons
This one showing my recent tweets is generated within Twitter itself and configured by the Jetpack suite of thingies in WordPress. If it’s not showing as an option in Appearance > Widgets, go to Jetpack > See the other 27 Jetpack features > Extra sidebar widgets > Configure, and you can find it there as Twitter Timeline (Jetpack).
Read the instructions carefully; it has a link you click to generate the widget within Twitter itself, and then you need to copy and past the long string of characters and delete everything but the one long number in the middle. (That sounds odd, but fear not, it’ll make sense when you get there.) Here’s the WordPress support link, if you’re still having trouble.
On my author website, I’ve added the Goodreads widget, which shows some of the top reviews for my mystery/thriller Poison Bay. Read this article from WordPress support for tips on how to add this widget and configure it the way you want.
Making your social presence visible:
- Helps people follow you on social networks.
- Allows people to easily give you credit when they share one of your articles.
- Gives the feeling that you are present and active, especially if they can see that you’ve posted something in the past few hours. (This is particularly handy if your blog posts are a little, um, old-ish. 😉 )
Edited 2019: I’ve removed some of the items from my sidebar to reduce the clutter. That’s also partly because the only people who see the sidebar are those using a computer. Lots of people read blogs on their phone these days.
Ingredient 4: Social sharing on your posts
Don’t confuse this with Ingredient 3. Instead, this is those little boxes at the bottom of your post that allow people to instantly share your work with their social networks.
You need both Ingredients 3 and 4.
Some WordPress themes have social sharing buttons baked in. I configured mine under Settings > Sharing, after activating them in Jetpack > Publicize.
If your theme doesn’t supply them or you don’t like the Jetpack options, go to Plugins > Add New and search “social sharing”.
You’d be surprised how adding these little buttons will boost your traffic. You don’t even have to be on all these social networks. Your readers are on them, and they share them with their own networks.
Make it easy for them to help you.
Ingredient 5: An email list
It’s so essential to be building an email list of the people who are interested in you and what you have to say. It’s a personal connection that is much more powerful than any social media presence.
I have been quite hopeless at building this over on my author site at belindapollard.com, and should be made to go and sit in the Naughty Corner for the oversight. 😉 But I’m working on it now.
If you are just starting, set up an email list people can join, from the beginning.
This article has a good list of the reasons why it matters, and some options for how to get started.
I use AWeber to manage my email lists on my various websites. They have powerful, user-friendly tools, and also now have a free option. More about that below.
Ingredient 6: An About page
We really do need to have a useful and informative About page. Unless we are on the run from the FBI, it also needs to have a bit more detail than one single, bland paragraph—but of course, without giving weirdos so much information that they can find our homes, know which nights we’re out, and where our kids go to school!
People who do the detour to your About page really are interested in you, so it’s a golden opportunity to make a friend and possibly a reader/client.
It’s a place where we can show some personality, as well as providing useful (or maybe just funny and/or surprising) facts.
The one over at my author blog has had a bit of work recently, and I’ve added links to various other pages on the site. As with everything online, it’s still a work in progress!
My About page here on this site is constantly being overhauled.
Because an About page is so personal, feel free to find a format and content that really suits you. Browsing around the About pages on other people’s blogs and websites can be a good place to find inspiration.
Please do call your About page just that – About – and not some other cute thing. People are trying to find it fast and if you call it something different, they are likely to think you just don’t have one.
Ingredient 7: Contact page
Make it easy for people to connect with you. One of them might be a literary agent, you never know! (It does happen.)
This page could include an email form, and a listing of all your social profiles. Or it can be very simple, like mine is currently.
I seem to get more contacts since I switched from the email form to simply listing an email address. But I do use an address that is not my main address, to help keep the messages separate from my normal mail. Do beware that just listing your email address as I have done can leave you open to spammers. I switched because the contact form I was using wasn’t working properly all the time. I don’t see my current Contact page as a perfect solution.
My website toolkit
Design can be a big decision for many of us. There are lots more options out there these days.
Compare my author blog with the home page of this site. (Both will open in a new window, so you can take a look without losing your place here.)
I’ve made belindapollard.com a hub that connects people to my various websites, and promotes my books.
Here, on the other hand, I decided to trial a “magazine style” blog, since this is a content-rich site with many articles that readers can browse. I’m always tweaking the layout, but I like the fact that a visitor can see there’s so many different things to look at, from the moment they arrive.
If you’re looking for ideas for where to start, these are the basic tools I use.
Hosting
I previously used Hostgator but have now switched to SiteGround.
What I like about them:
- Affordable prices
- Easy access to WordPress software—it is a swift upload from their Quick Install section
- Good support
- Less relentless upselling than I used to get from Hostgator
- My websites load much faster for visitors from Europe and Australia than they used to via Hostgator. (This was the main reason I switched.)
Design
I have now switched to the Genesis framework and Studiopress premium themes.
What I like about them:
- Simple and straightforward interface, so I can find where to do what I need to do. It’s much simpler than the one I was using before.
- Good stuff baked in to the themes, such as a place to automatically enter the same info at the end of each post; social sharing and social profiles; different colour options, etc etc.
- Nice designs and lots of them. This site uses the News Pro theme and my author site uses the Author Pro theme.
Spam filter: Akismet
At the time of writing, these dudes have stopped 116,000 spam comments from appearing on my site. (Man, those spammers are industrious—if they only put that much energy into making an honest living. 😉 )
Akismet is free for non-commercial websites, and there’s a small charge if you’re using the site for business. Look for it in Plugins > Add New.
Mailing list
I use AWeber, which now has a free level to get you started.
They give me the ability to:
- send newsletters
- send autoresponders (a series of emails about a particular topic)
- create pretty sign-up forms
- track what’s happening with my emails, such as whether they’re getting opened, forwarded etc.
These are the main reasons I prefer AWeber (your mileage may vary):
- I can make different sign-up forms for the same list, to suit different locations on my website.
- I can track who signs up from different forms and which articles are prompting the most sign-ups, to see what I should write more of!
- I can send an email to just a section of my list. For example, if I created a new resource for beta readers, I could send a note to all the people who have opened my articles about beta readers, as they’re the most likely to be interested. As an author, I can differentiate between what I say to subscribers who’ve read my book versus subscribers who haven’t. Handy.
What are your experiences with a website or blog? Any good tips to share? Or are you just getting started? Share your story in the comments below.
Featured image via Bigstock/kuleczka
This is a great article, simple enough to use as a checklist to improve your website. Even though I have most of the components on my blog, you have given me tips here I can use to further develop my own site. Thanks a lot.
/Kylie
P.s. I also use a Studiopress theme and love it for its clean design. Plus, it’s simple to make the design more personal.
Glad it’s useful, Kylie. It took me a long time to shift over to Studiopress, because I loved the theme I had and I’d spent a long time customising it… and I just didn’t want the extra WORK1 😉 But I’m glad I finally did it, as it has a lot more functionality than my old theme, because that one hadn’t been supported for a couple of years. Good to hear you’re finding Genesis themes useful too.
This was very helpful, Belinda, especially since I am about to update my website. Lots of great tips! Thanks. .
Thanks Carol! Glad it’s useful. 🙂
Thanks for this remarkably clear and helpful information. (And thanks to D.G. Kaye whose reblog sent me here!). Just about to create a new website for an upcoming book. As I’ve never created a site, only a blog, I am overwhelmed but this will help a lot. Greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your comment, Debby, and I wish you every success in your new site. I find the best way to go about it is “slowly”. You can always be adding to and tweaking your site, if you do it yourself using WordPress. So it doesn’t need to be perfect from the get go.
Hi, Belinda. I’ve been retweeting a bunch of your articles for the indexing partnership I belong to (Potomac Indexing, LLC), but I also have my own book shepherding biz and a couple of other sites as well.
Really love seeing basically all my own advice in one well-written package. Please do keep writing new material. Always worth the read.
I do use Mailchimp instead of Aweber and don’t find much use for the sharing icons, but may reconsider based on what you said. StudioPress and Genesis really rock; so nice to have simple, quality designs. 🙂
Thanks Joanne, glad it’s useful! Yes, it does take a lot of time to put a comprehensive article together, and time is not something I’ve had a lot of in recent months… but I want to get back into more regular blogging.
I’ve found that people really do use the sharing icons (as you can see by the counters on my sharing buttons above). Personally, I used to just use Hootsuite’s Hootlet when I found a good article somewhere. But for some reason I’ve drifted back to using a site’s own buttons for it. And it’s frustrating if they don’t have them — sometimes they just miss out on the share because of it, which is not an outcome we want for our blogs. 😉
Very best wishes with all your online activities. 🙂
Great Blog love the 7 tips
Thanks Kate – good to see you start blogging. 🙂
So good to see your new online home, Belinda! It looks fantastic. Great blog, too! I have a pet peeve, though–not about this post.. Whenever solutions or tools for WordPress are mentioned, I find myself reading a long article only to realize that it’s about WordPress.org sites, not WordPress.com. Now I know that the word “plug-in” is irrelevant to me (a WordPress.com user), as plug-ins apply only to .org sites. I just wish people would add that note at the beginning of an article to save us .com users some time.. Again, this complaint has nothing to do with your post. I easily understood that you have a self-hosted site.
Hope this great new look brings you ton of traffic!
Thanks for your feedback, Maria. I’m sorry you run into that frustration. I actually have never been to either .org or .com, because I get WordPress direct from Hostgator. 🙂 I know that people on Blogger have also asked me, “How do I do that? Is there a plugin for that on Blogger?” And I try to search it out for them, but usually can’t find anything, alas. Every different option has its own limitations, but I hope your blogging is working out well for you. You have a lovely blog. 🙂
Great tips, with a little different, fresh spin. That always makes stuff more readable than the standard didactic stuff. WordPress is good. Akismet does work very well. I too need to work on a mailing list. The only hangup about WordPress is that their forum for self-hosted sites is filled with arrogant snots whose “help” assumes knowledge that if you had, you wouldn’t need to ask questions.
I know what you mean, John. There’s one in every forum who doesn’t think you deserve to even have a computer if you can’t describe the inner workings of the binary code. That’s part of the reason I use premium themes. I get all my WordPress help from the people running the premium theme, and they are nice to me. 🙂
Thanks for a great article Belinda. I’m pleased to see I am on the right track. I already had five in place, have now put a sixth in place in response to your article, and will consider the seventh. Since it was you who instigated my start in blogging, I think you could say I’ve done a good job learning. Thank you. 🙂
Thanks so much for the encouraging words, Norah! Wishing you every kind of good thing in both your blogging and your publishing. 🙂
Great article Belinda! I have just made quite a few changes to my website and now a few more things to add. Thanks!
Glad its useful, Tanya. Looking forward to seeing your updated site. 🙂
A great article to guide me for when I beef up my web presence.
Looking forward to seeing you do that, Lorraine. 🙂
Great article Belinda, lots of useful tips. I really like the dropdown menus for your articles in the bottom nav bar. It looks great. I’m planning a revamp of my site for the launch of my second book so will be looking into it all shortly. Am definitely including a media kit this time.
I find that having the related posts plugin handy at the bottom of posts (and I see you have it too) as people often go to a second or third post. I know I often do so too when reading posts.
Thanks Lorna, and yes, I agree it’s good to show related posts. I probably need to do another 7 ingredients next week. 😉 Best for your new book!
Great article Belinda. Related posts are excellent, because they encourage people to stay on your website. This helps reduce your ‘bounce rate’ in the eyes of Google. A good bounce rate helps improve website ranking in Google organic search.
Good points, Anthony. I use a “related posts” plugin to show the list that appears at the bottom of each of my posts. I used to have a different one that showed a thumbnail image with each related article, but it was unreliable, so now I just have the plain text links. I’m not sure that many people notice them.
Fab article Belinda. Nice to see your presence back around. I guess we are all so busy. I’m bookmarking this handy article and of course sharing across the blogosphere. 🙂 Oh, and it’s cold and rainy here all weekend. Cold? Yes, 58 degrees, almost July!
Hi Debby, yes I’ve been MIA a lot this year. Another reason to go sit in the Naughty Corner. 😉 I just did the temperature conversion, and 58F is 14C… which would count as a bitter winter day in Brisbane! It is indeed winter here, and our forecast is for 20C/68F. 🙂
That’s winter? LOL. It’s back to a balmy 20 Celsius today, so my summer is your winter 😉
Be sure to rug up. 😀