Authors and publishers must have their own websites, that are mobile-friendly and looks professional, to market their books. It is, by far, one of the best strategy for book marketing. Following the article, you will get to read the complete guide to create an author website – from domain name purchase to getting web hosting, installing themes, setting up the useful plugins, and everything that crowns the complete look of the website.
Purpose of the website
First, you should be very clear that what is the main purpose of building an author’s website. Are you going to communicate with your readers? If that is the case, then you must know how possibly you can arrange the content and set visuals. So that so people can better understand your work. One step ahead, you can also sign-up for mailing lists and connect them with your social networking accounts. That way you can have better conveyance. Planning to give your audience some interesting facts and information about your reads? You can set up a Blog on your website. There you can post on regular basis to stay in the eye of your people.
On the condition that you want to tell people about your best-selling products. You can tell them by displaying them prominently and linking all the online retailers. From there, they can get their hands on your hot-selling cake pies. Provided that, being people’s choice, you want them to buy your books from your site? You must go for the eCommerce site to serve your author’s goals and needs for the long term.
How WordPress is good CMS for Author’s website?
Which platform you will choose to use for building your author’s website? That should be the first thing you need to decide before building a new site. Choosing from the most popularly used platforms can be hard and tricky. Here we can help you a bit. Do you want to go all easy or want to have the flexibility down the line? Do you just want to go for free things or also want to have profitable investments for your future?
Different authors can have different scenarios and may have different questions in their minds for which they want the solution. We believe there is one platform that meets the needs of every author in the world. Whether you want something simple or want to go complex. Whether you want something free or that with a bit of the expense. WordPress has it all.
Why WordPress?
We assume you want a website that not only narrates your writings but also reflects your true personality. In other words, you want a professional website. WordPress is a known website-building platform that has gained fame in a huge chunk of the entire internet. It’s being used by almost every person and business because it’s flexible, robust, and a value for money.
It’s Free And An Open-Source Platform
Good things never come without a price tag. And, you might be wondering if the most popular website building platform can be free. Well, this code underpinning WordPress is free and will always be free for its people. It’s an open-source platform. Thousands of developers are working at the backend. They are making it all easy for you to drag and drop elements and assemble the content. If you are a developer and can read the code. You can make changes to it to get a website of your choice.
Self-Hosted Platform
If using WordPress.org you need to download software for installing the site on the webserver to run it. By that, it means you need to do some research on the themes and plugins you want and install them. You also need to hire web hosting agencies that charge for hosting and managing your web server. However, if you go for WordPress.com you don’t need to download any software, pay for the hosting or hire an agency to manage your web server. Instead, your whole focus is moved to creating the best content for the website and making it stand out the most.
It Is Flexible
WordPress is by far the most flexible website-building platform. It allows you to choose the theme of your choice and install various plugins to add more features and make the site fully functional. Think of any possibility and you can do it with WordPress. Like, if you want video streaming, you can add videos to your WordPress website. If you want to sell your books through your website, WordPress allows you to create an online store. Want to have quizzes, slideshows, or a writing hub? You can have it all with WordPress. The platform allows you to run anything on your page to tell readers about your world.
Where To Get Started?
The below guide will help all the authors to start building their own website.
Think about the brand, logo, design so everything can relate
If you haven’t thought of any name for your site, think of it first. Make sure the website name is unique and goes with your purpose. The name should be decided first as it do impact the design of your whole website. And, Since its prominent so it needs to be attractive as well. Ideally, it should not be the name of any of your books. As it will make it specific to one book only. Preferably, it can be your name. Generally, your name is more searchable and then technically when the readers comes to search for your name they got to read every book that you wrote.
Previously, authors have been making websites for each of their books separately and it did cost them a lot of their time, money, and energy in marketing them individually. Not to mention, it just increase your updating headaches exponentially.
Once you have decided on the name for your website, now is the time to design the logo. Here you can take the help of professional logo designers or you can take the help of different software. You only need to enter the name of your website, customize the design by changing the color, text, icons, or layouts to create as many beautiful logos as you want. However, here you need to be very careful that the logo must go with your website and does not mislead the main purpose of your site.
Register your domain name if you don’t have any
Before we ask you to get the website name registered, we would love to educate you about the domain name.
What is domain name?
A domain name is a unique identifier and is an online internet address of your site. The domain has three parts known as Subdomain, Domain Name and Domain Extension. For example: www.webfulcreations.com. It’s an online address of our company website.
- www is the subdomain.
- WebfulCreations is the domain name.
- .com is the domain extension.
The domain name comes with unique IP address. The computer server use the numeric IP addresses to exchange the information. The only way to capture your unique “online identity” on the web is to get your domain registered.
Register Your Domain Name
There is a whole process behind registering a domain name. It consist of several steps like:
- Thinking of a unique domain name.
- Checking the availability of domain name.
- Registering the domain at internet service provider.
- Pay the dues.
- Confirming the link from ASCIO email that your domain is registered.
Note: It is possible the same domain name is claimed by different domain registration agencies. But this market serves on “first come, first serve” basis. So when anyone has paid for a specific domain name, he becomes the domain holder and the name is no more available at any of the domain registration parties.
Get A Good Web Hosting
You got the website for your business but don’t know where to get it hosted. There are different types of hosting services like:
- Shared Hosting
- Reseller Hosting
- VPS (Virtual Private Servers)
- Dedicated Servers
- Managed Servers
Shared hosting
It is best for new comers. It is best option for them as it does not cost them much and they can set it up easily and can maintain it themselves. This is a good option for bloggers, small businesses, or who owns a personal website. With shared hosting, users get the access to cPanel for database and application installations, managing emails, and transferring data to and from the server.
Reseller hosting
It is more like shared hosting and is best for web-designers and web-developers. Through reseller hosting they can manage their client’s website for as long as the project goes. When you buy reseller hosting packages you get all the benefits of shared hosting account along with the high controls of complete solution like Web Hosting Manager (cPanel), and billing software. With this hosting package your clients can resell their accounts. Reselling hosting packages are not expensive and can be sold under VPS or dedicated hosting services.
Virtual Private Servers
VPS offers great deals for those who wants more flexibility than shared hosting facilities. If you are a webmaster, developer, and a server reseller then VPS is the right choice for them all. It is a single server further partitioned in multiple separate servers. Every single VPS account is a part of a virtual machine acting as an independent server. With that flexibility, the user can make as many changes as he wants and that activity won’t affect any other account.
Dedicated Server Hosting
The Dedicated web-hosting servers are the most powerful servers among all types and that is why it is mostly demanded. However, this type of servers demand more attention to details while setting up, managing and maintaining it. With dedicated servers you get a kind of personal server where you will be able to manage a website with a lot of traffic and activities going on. Though, you can make a lot of changes to your website data with the dedicated servers but you still need a lot of technical knowledge to get things done rightly.
Managed Servers
Managed servers are the easiest form of web-servers as with it you don’t have to worry about how to install WordPress and configuring the cPanel. It is the best option for those business owners who want to get their websites live immediately. but, with managed servers you don’t have the access to its cPanel or FTP account. Since the managed servers are managed by web-hosting companies so you can not make changes to site data yourself nor you can open website’s source code or check the database.
To get the fully managed WordPress website hosting services, you can check WebfulHost with all of its advanced services. The company offers all kind of web hosting serves designed for easy website management, powerful DBMS, smooth delivery of your content with optimal speed and high responsiveness.
Find A WordPress Theme That Suits Your Requirements
Once you have created your website and get it hosted, the other challenging task is to find the best WordPress theme for it. Before choosing any, know what’s your website structure and layout. Whether you want to go for freemium or for premium with upgrades. Do you want more functionality or want to go with simple blog or profile theme.
Free WordPress Themes
If you choose to go for free themes you will get a lot of themes for your needs. The WordPress has made it a bit easy for people to find a theme for their website. The WordPress theme repository has different filters to find various themes sorted by popularity, featured, or latest added themes. If you use the featured filter, you will get to see several theme options that have all the features that you wanted on your website. Each option shown on the list has a demo web-page with other information about the theme, reviews from people who are already using it, its development history, the updated version history and also shows the link to its support forum. You can also select a theme on the basis of its popularity like how many times it has been downloaded yet or how much rating it has got.
Premium WordPress Themes
You will get to find a lot of WordPress themes from different theme marketplaces. They have variety of premium themes. Why you should go for premium themes? Here are a few reasons why it is worth paying money for premium themes:
- Regular theme updates for security, WordPress compatibility, and advanced features.
- Better support forums and support tickets for any kind of troubleshooting.
- To get child themes or different variations of base theme.
- Additional customization
- More features for e-commerce, real estate, and other specialized uses.
Install Your WordPress Theme And Demo Content
Once you get the theme, many people faces problems while setting up a theme. With every theme there comes an ample set of documentation that includes videos and written documents. if you get stuck anywhere you can either use the support ticket to the public forum or you can get the help from experts. At WebfulCreations we help you install any WordPress theme.
You can install themes using any theme installer. The theme is installed in the form of zipped files. You can either install the theme by using the upload method or you can go for the FTP process. If you are not a technical person then go for the “Upload Theme” process. It is easy and your WordPress will automatically uploads the theme to your server.
Import Demo Content
If your theme offers the functionality of one-click demo imports, then what’s better than that. The process of importing the data is same in almost all themes but may varies as per the theme purchases. The process involves:
- Go to WordPress Dashboard.
- Select Import Demos.
- Browse all available demos and choose one.
- Click on “Import Demo” button.
- Wait for the demo content to be installed in a while.
Change The Demo Content With Your Real Content
In case you want to remove whole demo content from your site you can use two methods.
Method 1: WP Reset plugin
If you want to go to the starting point of the WordPress website where there is no content then you can use WP Reset plugin. The plugin will help you to remove every content from your selected theme. It does not remove plugins but will deactivate them and remove all pages, posts, menus, sliders, widget data, etc. You can only use this plugin if you do not want the demo content at all and want to start over all again.
Method 2: Manual Removal
If you want the demo content but want to make a few changes to it then you can do it yourself. This content changing process may take a lot of your time but by removing the specific content you can have the content ready for your website. This method involves the manual activities like removing the content that you don’t want anymore and replace it with your own content. You can also hire writers for your website page content. At WebfulCreations we have a proper team of writers wo can help you get all new content for your web pages. You can hire the team for writing services anytime and get the fully customized web content with the quick delivery.
Install Google Site Kit To Monitor Stats
Fortunately, for WordPress users, all of the Google analytic tools can be found at one place and that is the Google Site Kit Plugin. The plugin is readily available in the WordPress plugin marketplace. The plugin helps the user easily monitor their website analytics, search consoles, page speed insights, website optimization, tag management and AdSense data right in your WordPress Dashboard.
The Google Site Kit plugin is created by Google is designed to work seamlessly with the WordPress’s most insightful tools. You can install it directly from the plugins marketplace and then activate it to get started.
How to use Google Site Kit?
Google Sit Kit offers a dashboard where you can see the complete data analytics of your website. The dashboard gives you an overview of each tool you have connected to your website to rank it properly on the search engines. From the dashboard you can see your website’s traffic and also metrices for each of the webpage and post. You can also view the breakdown of your most searched data as well as can see the stats of your most popular pages. Using the Site Kit plugin you can also check the close estimate of your recent earnings made by the ads on your website. From the dashboard you will get to know which page on your website are most lucrative and can help you earn more.
Install Yoast SEO Plugin
If you want to rank high on search engines then your websites must have Yoast SEO plugin installed. This SEO plugin is by far the most popularly used with plenty of complex features to give you a complete control over your website SEO. You can get the plugin easily from the plugin marketplace and install it from there. Once you have installed and activated the plugin you will get to see the SEO dashboard from where you can configure it. The next step is to setup the plugin.
Once you have activated the plugin you can start configuring the general settings. From the General Setting tab you can restore or modify your configuration wizard. Some of the sections in the setting pages will be optional and you can skip them if you want. From the plugin dashboard you can find the problems if there are any in your website. Additionally, from the notification section you can find what recent updates are available and also can read the provided information about any update.
Try Some Cache Plugins For Performance
Caching is a process of storing the static copies of your website in a temporary storage location. The process allows the webpage to open in user’s browser more quickly. While you are using caches, some of the data is automatically stored in user’s device. So the next time user opens your website some of the data from their device will fetched from the local server of their device instead of your web server. Many website platforms have there own caching tools installed but WordPress does not have any feature to cache. However you can install any cache plugin available in WordPress plugin marketplace.
Best WordPress Cache Plugins
In WordPress, you will get a whole collection of cache plugins that enables you to easily and quickly cache all of your web pages and posts. We have got a few options for you to install. They include both free and premium performance checking plugins for your WordPress website.
- WP Rocket
- WP Fastest Cache
- LiteSpeed Cache
- WP-Optimize
- W3 Total Cache
- WP Super Cache
- Hummingbird
- Cache Enabler
- Comet Cache
- Borlabs Cache
One must have a cache plugin installed in their WordPress website as it help in boosting web performance and also increases user experience. You can use any of the above mentioned plugin to enhance your website speed without digging into the theme code.
Hire A developer To Make You A Website
Hiring a website developer will help you get the best web tools like web hosting and domain management. if you are not a coder but still want a top-notch website for your business then we suggest you to hire a professional website developer. Building a website can be time taking as it is not a simple process. Hiring a skillful developer will save a lot of your time as he will be managing everything for you.
Also, you might not be aware of every new technology coming. So the developer will know about every modern technology and can help you keep your website up to date. If you are wondering where you can get the best website developer then your search is over. As at WebdulCreations we have a whole team of website developers that can help you built any kind of website. Our website designing and developing services are promising and we do value our customers.
What Pages Or Sections Should Author Website Have?
Whether you are a fiction or non fiction writer, or you write books for children or adults, you must know what your Author Website should include. The must have pages of your website includes:
- Home Page
- About Page
- Book Page
- Event or Media Page
- Blog Page
- Contact Page
The Home page is the most important page of your whole website. From this page a reader gets to know more about you and your readings. This is the page that ranks on Google search engine so it must look good and have everything about your writings.
They says “Fist impression is the last impression”. So when designing the homepage, you must know that it should neither look bluff and stuffed with a lot of information nor have the limited information that the reader has to move to other pages to look for the data they want to know about. The homepage should have one clear focus to capture all what actually the visitors are looking for. To get an idea you can check the snapshot of one of the author’s website homepage that we have designed.
The other pages have their own importance and must be designed accordingly. Each page should contain valid information and the layout must hold the content beautifully.
Other Things That Author’s Website Should Have
We have almost guided you about everything that how you can create your first Author Website. However, there might be a few more things that you should consider while building a website for your books. The Author’s website should also have a list of all published books that must be linked in the top navigation. Each book cover should be displayed perfectly that catches the reader’s eye easily. The author should keep the readers updated about his new releases to make it easy for fans to find the book with the latest buzz. While some authors do it wrong but we suggest you to make it easy for your people to get in touch with you. When they communicate with you more, you get more ideas about your future writings as you get to know what people want from you. The best way is to incorporate the contact button in the top menu bar and also add the contact form in every page to ensure that you don’t miss out on any of the feedback from your people. Let people explore your world with freedom.