Author Websites & Where To Start

Aside from author events and book signings, your website provides your greatest visibility to connect with readers one-on-one. It’s a first impression and a starting point for book sales. It’s also a daunting task to design and build. Luckily, there are website platforms that make it easier than you think.

Buying Your Domain

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. First, you need a domain, and there are some best practices to consider.

The first thing to decide is your domain name, which often becomes the direct extended entity of your brand. If you’re an author, consider using your name as your domain, but avoid hard-to-spell or long domain names. Interest favors brevity and simplicity. Use a domain registry to check for availability and to purchase your license. You’ll have the option to buy variations for domain suffixes. If .com is available, that should always be your first choice. Although there are dozens of suffix options, most people default to .com when recalling a website. If your chosen domain .com is taken, choose another domain to help prevent confusion.
While you may want to keep your domain for a long career, you might not want to keep your Content Management System (CMS) forever. Many CMS platforms bundle a free or low-cost domain as part of their service package. While convenient, it ties your domain to their service, making it difficult to “port” the domain to another service. You may also find that the platform’s “low-cost” option is multiple times more expensive than it needs to be.

Quick Start: Read Forbes “10 Best Domain Registrars of 2024”

Choose a Content Management System (CMS)

Choosing a CMS involves considerations around costs, desired functionalities, your comfort with tech & planned ways your site could evolve. WordPress and Wix are powerful platforms with many built-in features and ready-to-use templates that short-cut the building process and require no coding or webmaster experience. Pricing ranges from free to several hundred dollars per year.

When selecting your site’s platform, compare which features are included at different investment levels. Free generally gives you a small selection of templates, a domain tied to the platform with minimal customization (ex. mysite.blog.wordpress.com,) and little else. If you plan to run Google Ads (AdSense) or sell books and products on your site, you’ll need a plan that includes e-commerce functions.

Your CMS and third-party domain service will provide instructions for assigning your domain to the site.

Don’t Ignore Your Site Settings

Your website settings establish the foundation for who will see your site (public or member-only) and whether you wish to allow comments and/or moderation for your content.

In addition, it sets the foundation for many less obvious features:

Define permalink structure (essentially any other information you wish to display with your domain and page information, such as date, time, category, etc.)

Time zone and calendar formatting.

Your site name, tagline, and description, also known as your meta description, which search engines crawl and will display in search results.

Establish your homepage (blog posts or static page.)

Define default image sizes.

Templates & Themes

When readers arrive on your homepage, everything they see on their screen is considered “above the fold,” an old newspaper term that lives on when explaining the impact of first impressions. The first image and words seen should be engaging and encourage readers to either scroll for more content or click further into the website.

Unless you’re web-savvy and building the site yourself, choose a template that lets you show off what’s most important at first glance. Images of your book cover or of yourself speaking at an event act as social proof of your credibility as an author.

Next, consider colors and layouts. They should align with your genre, giving your online brand the same feel as your writing. This is a subtle way to let readers know what to expect from your books and get them engaged enough to want to know more and purchase your book.

Taxonomy

It’s a fancy way to say, “Let’s get organized.” Websites naturally incorporate taxonomy in three ways: menus, categories, and tags. Make a flow chart, starting with your homepage, and then branch out to your menu items. A uniform structure will appear that mirrors your site map. When search engines crawl your site, they will note the link’s page URL, which includes vital information such as your domain, page name, and category. The crawler then follows those links, searching for content clues that might answer a query, tags that further define the content, and words that appear in bold, italic, underlined, headers or subheaders, and lists. Whether or not the tag/category is visible to someone visiting your site, the web crawler can see it, using it to deliver traffic when it matches a search query.

You can use categories and tags to organize information into Topic pages or allow site visitors to select tags to help them find blog posts they want to read. It is also what drives internal searches on websites. (Think of how you enter a topic or product in the search bar on Amazon. That’s an enormous example of using tags, categories, and meta descriptions to narrow down the purchase selections they will provide you.)

Design an ‘About’ Page like None Other

Your About section is more than a writing resume. Show off how you became fascinated with your subject, share stories related to your research and any specialized skills you had to master along the way. It’s also the perfect place to list book signings or upcoming events where fans can meet you and have their book autographed. Have fun with it, and most of all, be yourself.