Websites for Writers: Introduction
Advance Warning: Sometimes, we just have to indulge our obsessions. One of mine is websites. I've managed to hold off for a while now, but no longer! I'm going to post a series of entries on how you go about planning, building and maintaining a successful website. Particularly a writer's website. If you have no interest in any of this, just skip on past any entries that start with 'Websites for Writers', including this one. I'm sure I'll manage some other entries in between.
As some of you know, a month or two ago, I started to redesign my website. I've had a website for quite a few years now, since before I'd sold my first story, and it's been through a lot of incarnations, starting from a fairly basic creature to the database-driven, shiny one I've got now.
The web changes. The way people use it changes. What we're able to use it for changes. People's expectations of what they'll find on the web change. That means our websites need to change fairly frequently too.
So, when I decided to redesign my website, I spent quite a lot of time looking at other writers' websites. Whenever I build a website, I always take a bit of time to see what other similar websites are like. In most areas, 'standards' develop for the way websites are laid out and navigated.
Visitors who are used to certain items being in certain places, and who are used to information being grouped in certain ways, can become confused if a site doesn't match those expectations.
Some of these are generic expectations. For example, most websites have their logo and a link to the 'homepage' in the top left. Most commerce sites have a 'shopping basket' in the top right. Copyright information, privacy statements and other 'admin' stuff go in the footer.
My day job is as a website developer for a university. If you visit almost any university website, you're almost certain to see sections called 'Prospective Students' and 'Research'. It makes it easy for visitors to find the information they want quickly and unambiguously.
You don't have to follow these conventions, of course, but it always helps to be aware of them so you know what your visitors are likely to be expecting. I wanted to see if any similar conventions had developed specifically for writers' websites.
I looked at over a hundred writers' websites. I didn't find any patterns or conventions. What I did find, though, was pretty depressing. I won't claim that my survey was in any way scientific. It was pretty random. But 95% of the websites I looked at had only one thing in common: they were dreadful. Not just poor, but absolutely, uselessly appalling.
This isn't surprising, of course. We're writers, for the most part, not web designers or developers. Some of us are artistic; most of us (including me) aren't. Very few of us would know where to start in putting together a good website, let alone how to code it and make it happen.
It's certainly nothing to be ashamed of if you've created a website and it didn't turn out to be as well organised as the BBC news website or look as visually stunning as the examples you might see on the CSS beauty gallery or Stylegala. These sites are often created by large teams of highly-paid professionals.
But, shockingly, it seemed that many authors had actually paid for the dreadful sites they have. There are companies out there who advertise website design services for writers and who obviously have no idea what they're doing. Too many writers end up using these. (Not all web designers aiming at authors are terrible--I highlight a couple of fantastic ones when I talk about design later on.)
So, I thought I would put together a brief guide for writers who want or need a website. Even if you're planning to get someone else to build and design your website for you--perhaps even more so if you are--it's worth thinking about this stuff, or you may end up with a site that's taken time, cost money and which is completely useless to you.
I'm going to start off by talking about planning your website, then go on to discuss organising it into something coherent and helpful. I'll cover the issues of design, getting visitors to your site, structure, writing for the web and anything else that comes to mind along the way. If you find any of it useful, if you disagree with anything I've said, if you've got anything to add or if you want to ask any specific questions, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to address it.
Okay, now onto the real stuff! My next entry will be on 'Planning Your Website'. See you then!
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psamphire) wrote,
