Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Creating a Template


This is a sample web site for a fictional author named Keith that demonstrates many of the important elements that should be included in an author's web site.  Its purpose is to give someone with limited experience in setting up a web site a list of tasks to consider.

A Bio

Tell everyone a little about yourself.

A Book List

Make sure that you have a list of your books available with links to purchase them.

Manage Subscriptions

Readers who subscribe to your site or to your newsletter are one of your best resources. Treat them well, and never abuse their trust by spamming them with lots of promotional material.

Contact Information

You never know who might visit your site and want to contact you. Make it easy to find the information, but only share what you are comfortable with.

Schedule

If you are going to be somewhere where your readers can meet you, be sure to include it on your site. If you have a very busy schedule, then you may want to have a separate page for all of your events. For most of us, adding a blog post with the information will probably be sufficient.

Blog

Update your site every now and then.  Let your readers know you are still around and what's going on.  When making a blog post, be sure to enable comments. You might not want comments for the static pages, but the purpose of  your blog is to engage readers, and they can only do that if you have comments enabled.

Additional Resources

You can find information about setting up a web site on Google's Blogger at tiwsg.com
http://www.tiwsg.com/p/resources.html