Designing Your Writer’s Web Site

As a freelance writer today, your Web site is an important part of your marketing plan. It will be your online home, the place where hundreds and possibly thousands of people will get to know you. It’s the place where you can present your products and grow your business by obtaining more work. Once you purchase a domain and choose a hosting service, you’re ready to begin designing your site.

Whether you design your site yourself or hire someone to do it for you, you’ll need to know what to include. Professional Web designers may know how to put material onto the Internet, but you can bet that very few know what’s needed on a writer’s site.

Every Web site contains the same basic parts—a Home Page, an About Page, Content pages, a Resources or Links Page, and a Contact Page. The Home Page is usually the first page a visitor sees. It’s the introductory page to your site and connects through a navigation menu to the other pages of the site.

The next most important page on your site is the About Page. Here, you’ll present yourself—why you chose to be a writer, what publishing experience you’ve had, and your social media connections. It’s important to let readers know where else you’re active online. You’ll also want to have a professional looking photo of yourself on the page.

Another important page is the Contact Page of your site. This should include ways in which visitors to your site—either editors or readers or both—can contact you. Here, you’ll post your preferred methods of cotnact—regular mail by street address, phone number for home or cell, and Email address.

A page which you may want to include is a Resource Page, which contains links to other sites that are of interest to you or are related to the subjects you write about. Many writers think that they don’t need outside links because they’ll take visitors away from their site. Actually, these links help visitors to find your site. The right links help to raise your rankings on search engines like Google which enables readers to find you faster. The rest of your site contains pages of your content—books, article listings, etc.

Before you decide on what your site will look like, you need to figure out its purpose. What do you want your site to do? Do you want to connect with your readers or do you want to connect with your editors, or perhaps both. Your site needs to have a direction and a unity that visitors will eventually associate with you.

First and foremost, your name should appear as an integral part of your Home Page. Under it you may want to add a tagline that clearly describes the type of writing you do.

You may also want to include an Email newsletter signup. Whether you send a newsletter once a year or once a week, you’ll want to stay in touch with readers who visit your site. MailChimp is one email newsletter service that’s free for up to 2,000 names, which helps automate this process for you.

If you write non-fiction, your site should contain a sample list of articles you’ve published. And if you also write non-fiction books, you can either have a book page or a separate page for each book, with links to Amazon.com so that your visitors can easily purchase them. In the beginning, you could easily combine everything into one page.’

If you write fiction, both short stories and novels, you can follow the same as above. You may even want to include a sample short story, one that’s one or two pages long. Novels can be listed much as non-fiction books, but if you write books in a series, then you’ll want to group them by series, with additional separate pages for each book, with a synopsis, reviews, and an excerpt. And always include links to where your work can be read or purchased in both print and digital form.

Depending on what you write, you may have been covered in the media. Create a page with testimonials and links to reviews or articles about you.

One of the biggest mistakes many writers make when developing their site is getting clever with menu listings or pages. Your Web site isn’t the place to get clever. It must be clear and straightforward, with logical navigational links to your various pages. Try to limit your menu to five or seven items. If you have a lot of content, group it into sections, then list the section titles in your Home Page menu. Create a separate menu with items pertaining to that section on the first page of each section, called the Landing Page. And always link back to your Home Page.

Another mistake many writers make is creating a blog page and calling it their Web site. While a blog is on a Web page, it isn’t a Web site. Your site needs to contain the four basic pages, plus various pages containing your content.

Don’t think you have to create all your pages at once. Start with the four basic pages, plus perhaps one page listing your work, then proceed from there. Creating new content keeps search engines happy and brings visitors back.

To learn about a basic Web site design package, check out BBC Web Services.

Next Week: You’ve Got a Site—Now What?

Too Good to Be True

“Make a great living while working from home (or from a coffee shop, or poolside, or while you travel) ...YOU decide what you write about and for whom.” Sounds almost too good to be true. In fact, that’s just what it is.

The above blurb, promoting a free webinar and report, recently appeared in a Writer’s Digest Update Email. Look at the phrases used—great living, working from home, coffee shop, poolside, while you travel—all things you’d love to do. And that’s the catch. Each of these phrases causes unsuspecting writer wannabees to start day dreaming about a life they’d love to have, away from the drudgery of the cubicle they inhabit every day.

There are lots of seminars and come-ons out there, enticing beginners. Each plays on the dreams of people like you. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not bad to dream. But as far as writing is concerned, it pays to add a touch of practicality to your dreams.

Let’s look at each of these phrases.

Make a great living. Yes, you can make a living as a writer—I’ve been doing it for 29 years. But only a handful of lucky writers makes a “great” living. In fact, as I’ve said so many times in this blog, writing is hard work and generally the pay is often in the moderate range. Unless a writer produces a blockbuster bestseller, about the only way to make big bucks is to do corporate writing. And that puts you right back in the cubicle, even if only virtually.

Working from home. In today’s technologically inspired marketplace, you can do a lot of things from home. Computers make that possible. So why writing? You may be passionate about writing. Or perhaps friends have told you that you write well. Or you may look at writing as a way to get people to notice you.

From a coffee shop. Everyone imagines themselves sitting in a Starbucks writing the next great American novel. Have you been to a Starbucks recently? Chances are you won’t find a seat. That’s because so many people use it as their mobile office. It seems everyone in the place has a laptop open to the Internet or is working on a document or spreadsheet. However, if you ignore the caché of Starbucks and try Dunkin Donuts, for example, you’ll usually have the place to yourself.  Isn’t what you’re doing more important than where you’re doing it?

Poolside. The same applies to sitting poolside and working on your laptop. This isn’t the safest place to work, unless you just happen to have your own pool. If that’s the case, you probably don’t need to make a living as a writer in the first place. But if you try this at a public pool or swim club, chances are the kiddies will splash that shiny new laptop of yours and ruin whatever you are working on.

While you travel. Everyone—and I mean nearly everyone—dreams of traveling the world and writing about it. It seems like the ideal glamorous life. However, they see it from a vacation perspective, not a working perspective. Most likely the only travel they’ve done has been on vacation, where time isn’t important and they can do pretty much what they want. But working while traveling is something else. You’ll be constantly living out of a suitcase. Unless you’re independently wealthy, you’ll have to beg someone else to pay for your trip—and travel isn’t cheap these days. And finally, depending on your schedule and the work you need to accomplish, you may not even have time to enjoy the places you visit. And forget about a family life. You won’t have time for it.

So before you get suckered into free webinars or costly seminars that promise to show you the way to writing riches, think carefully the practical side of being a full-time writer.

A Room of Your Own

Technology today allows you to write just about anywhere. However, running a successful business requires you to be organized. And as much as the techies keep telling us that computers allow us to have paperless offices, the more paper we seem to accumulate.

You’ll find that you’ll be better equipped to compete in the freelance marketplace if you have your own office. Sure, laptops and tablets allow you to write allow you to write wherever you happen to be and cell phones allow you to conduct interviews and do online research. But being totally mobile doesn’t help you stay organized, especially if like me you focus on non-fiction.

A home office has its advantages. First, there’s no rent to pay. You also don't have to worry about commuting, especially in bad weather. When you're not feeling up to par, you can do filing or paying bills, while still taking it easy. Also, if you’re working at home you may be less likely to catch those nasty viruses. You can also keep up with the news by radio or television if you want. You'll find you can work in whatever degree of casual attire you like. And finally, there's less wear and tear on your car or transportation budget.

Start with your own office, no matter how small it might be—a space entirely yours that’s available to you at any and all times where you do nothing but business tasks. It’s not impossible to freelance without an office, but it’s harder. In fact, you’ll soon realize that having your own office will increase your productivity. Here is the place you can steal away to when the creative urge hits or when you need to concentrate on a particularly difficult project.

You can create an office almost anywhere in your home or apartment. It can be in the corner of a room to start, but soon you’ll find that there’s no way to keep the interruptions from happening. It should be located in a room with a door, preferably one that you can lock from both sides. It’s not a good idea to take over your whole basement, for example, because no one else will be able to use it at the same time. Take a corner and put up two simple walls of framing and plasterboard with a door. Make sure the area has electrical connections and perhaps phone connections. You can do the same in any room in your house. Or take over a small bedroom.

While many homes have more than one computer, some have only one, shared by all the members of the family. This won’t do to freelance. Sure, you might be able to work when children are in school and your spouse is at work, but what if you have a sudden deadline, and someone else is using the computer? It’s best to plan on buying a desktop or laptop of your own, dedicated to your business—one that no one else should use. Remember, computer viruses brought home from school or work can infect your computer as easily as those that infect humans. And you need to protect your work at all times.

Some people need more creature comforts to work effectively than others. How fancy you make your office is up to you. Essentially, you’ll need a desk—not necessarily an actual desk—file cabinets or shelves with file boxes, a comfortable chair besides your desk chair in which you can sit and read over your drafts, and whatever other creature comforts you’d like.

And as mentioned above, using a computer doesn’t eliminate the need for paper files. Over time, these will multiply, and you’ll have to deal with them. As a freelancer, it’s important to keep at least one file folder for each piece you write. If you write books, then you’ll need at least one file folder for each chapter.  Over the years, you’ll discover that boxes of files seem to accumulate faster than you can find a place to store them. So start planning on a storage area for your files from the start.

It’s a lot easier to convince people that you’re a legitimate business today than it was a few years ago. Home offices are quite common since modern technology has enabled many people to work out of their homes. But you’ll probably have to set some ground rules, unless you live and work alone. Make sure your family understands that when you’re in your office, you’re working and should not be disturbed. With a proper office, you’ll also be able to apply for credit, etc., as a bonafide business. And don’t forget to fill out the form for deducting business expenses in your home with your federal and state income tax.

NOTE: If your office looks like the one pictured above, then you're probably not writing. You're only dreaming about being a writer.