Writer to Author Series pt. 3|Setting Up (or revamping) Your Author Website

January 16, 2020

Think of your author website as your “home base.”

This is where people will come when they want to learn more about you and what you do/what you have to offer. If you remember my post, You Have 5 Seconds…, then you’ll know that it doesn’t take long for someone to decide to stick around on your site…

…or not.

For this part of the series, I’m not going to go into how to set up your self-hosted site with a hosting company, talking about different paid plans and such. Currently, I’m not experienced enough to give you tips on that (maybe some day). We’ll be talking more about your website’s design, the pages you need on your site, subscribe forms, using Mailchimp, etc.

Ready?

The .com vs. the .org

If you created your site through wordpress.com, then you probably have the .wordpress.com part at the end of your URL. This means that it is NOT a self-hosted site. Technically, WordPress has the right to change or remove something from your site. I’ve never heard of this happening, but still…

I have a self-hosted site (hosted by Bluehost) through wordpress.org. The site is mine, WordPress cannot change anything about it without my permission. I recommend getting a self-hosted site. If not now, then some time in the future.

By the way, your website URL should be your author name; [yourname].com. That will make it easier to be found (also by publishing houses and agents).

Design tips

I am no graphic designer or anything, just to make that clear…

A clean, eye-catching blog theme. WordPress has a lot of great free themes you can use, but you can also get one designed with companies like Syd + Em Studios or Stellae Design. Or you can buy a theme from places like Creative Marketplace (that’s what I did) and Restored 316. You’ll notice that probably 99.9% of these themes have white backgrounds. This is the most popular and highly recommended color you use as your background, because it makes things feel clean and bright.
Color schemes. Blogs that stick to a color scheme have a really nice aesthetic feel to them and people are more attracted to them. Pinterest is a great place to find color palettes. When you find one that you like, use those colors exclusively for your site’s design accents, graphics, accent font colors, etc. If you’ve already decided on your brand colors from part 2 of the series, then you already have your website colors. 🙂
Quality images. You need sharp, eye-catching, clear, good-quality images. WordPress has a lot of free images to use for your posts that are great, or you can find some on places like Pexels and Getty Images.
Make sure you add your socials. This might change a little depending on your theme design, but with my theme I’m able to put my social icons on the main menu and below my ‘about me’ widget. Then people can see where else they can connect with and follow you.

What goes on the sidebar?

The sidebar on your site will provide smaller bits of information for your visitors as well as hold your subscribe form…

THAT is where your sidebar is. It’s all the widgets on one side of the layout. Here are some widgets that you can put here:

A mini ‘about me.’ This gives new visitors a quick way to learn a little about you without having to read your whole ‘About’ page. It’s always better to include a good-quality headshot of yourself rather than leave it blank or use some sort of avatar. People connect better when they can see the person behind the blog. Use the same headshot that you will across all your social platforms.
Search bar. Pretty self-explanatory. If people want to find something specific on your site, they’re not going to dig through your archives.
Subscribe form. We’ll talk in a little bit about how to create one with Mailchimp.
Recent Posts. At a glance your visitors can see what kind of content you offer or be able to catch up on your recent posts.
Instagram widget. We’ll be talking about getting started on Instagram soon, but you can get a plugin that will display your feed, like this:
The My Book Progress widget. I’ve gotten so many questions about what this widget is and how I got it. This plugin can display your current projects with their covers and status (which you can customize). You’ll most likely update this more frequently than you ‘Books’ page, so it’s an easy, fun, and quick way for people to see how your writing’s going.
Post categories. How this is done might change depending on your theme design. Some allow you to set up a widget with your main post categories (usually as an image).
‘Featured’ article or most popular article(s). Some like to display their most popular article in a widget.

Pages you need on your site

Here are some crucial pages you need so people can get the information they’re looking for from you…

‘About’ page. The page that goes more in depth about yourself than what’s in the small widget on your sidebar. Describe your personality, hobbies you enjoy, your writing, and why you write. Check out these posts from Hubspot and Reedsy about how to write a great author bio.
‘Contact’ page. People need to be able to contact you, for one reason or another. Your blog’s theme may have a contact form that comes with it, but you can also easily make one with the plugin WPForms.
‘Books’ page. People want to know what you’re up to! Include a page with the synopses, status, and covers (if you have them) of your projects. When you get a book published, this page may change to only having your published works. Your WIPs might end up being on a separate page (or you can just stick with the My Book Progress widget).
‘Blog’ page. For a lot of people (including myself) this acts as their home page as well. Which means you wouldn’t actually have to create a ‘Blog’ page, because it would be your home page.

Creating Pinterest graphics

Pinterest is a large and fast-growing platform that makes it really easy to share things with people and save information for later. Making pinterest graphics for your posts will give readers the perfect graphic to share or pin to a board.

I use Canva for all my graphics, and I’ve been enjoying it a lot! It’s easy to use and free to make an account (of course, there are paid features). I don’t know enough about graphic design to give you a step-by-step guide for this part, but you can check out Canva to familiarize yourself with it and experiment. Canva’s many templates make it easy to create professional-looking designs without having a lot of experience.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp is what I use to create my landing pages, emails, subscribe forms, and manage email lists. It’s super easy to use once you get the hang of it and free to use until you reach 2,000 contacts.

When setting up your account, before to use your business email. Mailchimp does require you to put in an address. And this address will show up in the footer of emails you send out until you edit that.

Making a subscribe form

Once you’ve gotten your account set up and customized your settings (and created an email list for your website subscribers), you can start creating things like subscribe forms (embedded and pop-up ones) and more. Let me show you how to create a subscribe form for your sidebar. First, click the ‘Create’ button in the upper-right corner:

Then the ‘subscribe form’ option:

Then you will be able to choose which email list this form is for. At this point, you’ll only have one list for your website subscribers. So choose that list. Make sure ‘Embedded form’ is selected:

Then you’ll be met by this:

I would recommend choosing the Horizontal option for embedding into your sidebar. I think it’s best to just stick with only the email address field for this form: the less information people have to put in, the more likely they’ll subscribe. Then you’re going to need to copy and past the code for the form onto your site:

Once you’ve copy all that code text, go to your site’s Appearance<Widgets. You’ll need to find the widget that looks like this…

…and drag and drop it into your sidebar. Type ‘Subscribe’ into the widget title, and paste the subscribe code into the Content field. Click ‘save’ and ‘done,’ and you’re all set with you sidebar form. 🙂

Another way you can make forms and add them to your site is to get the Mailchimp for WordPress plugin.

Creating your emails to send blog posts

This is how I send out my blog posts via email. You are able to set up RSS with Mailchimp so it sends out posts automatically, but I’ve had some trouble with it in the past so I just stopped using that feature.

Okay, so click ‘Create’ again. And click ‘Email’:

Name your campaign (probably just the title of your blog post) and make sure that ‘Regular’ email is selected.

Now you’ll be met with this:

Now it’s time to fill in these fields. In the first, set it to send to your website’s email list. In the ‘From’ field, add your name and business email. In the Subject, you can put the title of your blog post. Now for ‘Content,’ you will be designing you email how you like. We’re not going to go into designing emails right now, but play around and experiment to see what you like (be sure to keep using your brand colors and fonts for your email designs). You’re able to create a email template so that you don’t have to redesign it every time. Provide a link to the new post in your email.

Once you’ve done all of that, you can choose the Schedule button or Send. I use the scheduling feature all the time; it’s awesome to be able to plan content ahead of time.

Now yes, I have to go through all of this to send a email out every time I have a post going out. And yes, it’s a bit of work, but I like how it turns out and I recommend doing it this way. Just be sure to make the scheduling date for your Mailchimp email and when you set your post to go out is the same.

Well, I could go on and on with Mailchimp tutorials, but we’re just going to stop here for now (feel free to contact me if you have questions about Mailchimp though).

So, there you have it. The basics of setting up your author website for success. I know there are many more aspects of this that I didn’t cover, but I hope this is enough to get you started. If you have more questions about this subject, then ask them in the comments! I’ll answer them (and if you know an answer to a question, feel free to answer too 😉 ) and we’ll get a discussion going. 🙂