Sillybean

The web design for authors posts I’ve been doing have evolved into an actual business. Paged Media is a web design company devoted to authors.

You know me; the designs will be standards-compliant, CSS-based, accessible, and search engine friendly no matter what. We’re also using basic content management wherever we can. We know a good [...]

Good discussion of what should go on an author’s site over at LiveJournal. Of course, yours truly had to weigh in, but other people had interesting things to say too.

My original comment exceeded LJ’s character limit. I’ll take that as the universe’s subtle hint that I should start posting here more often again, now [...]

I’m swamped with work, and in my free time I’ve been writing madly. And I’m getting back to that in just a second, but I wrote this up quickly as a reply to someone and then realized that it was too long and I really should just post it here instead.

I just went through, for [...]

Misspellings. I know of at least one NYT bestseller whose name is misspelled in her page title. There’s no copyeditor between you and your web audience. And search engines won’t recognize you if there’s a typo in your name. Script kiddie language. (“R U sexxy?” Probably not.) Font abuse — a proliferation of colors and/or styles. Comic [...]

Mouse droppings. As annoying as pop-up ads — and the only way to get rid of them is to leave the site. Mystery meat navigation. Your visitors should never have to guess where to click. Transition effects. Java plugins or applets. These things are guaranteed to crash somebody’s browser, even if they work in yours. Javascript that disables basic [...]

(I realize lists of things you shouldn’t do are less helpful than tips on what you should do, but let’s get the basics out of the way first. I’ll get back to the proactive stuff in a bit.)

Backgrounds, borders, bars, and bullets taken from a free graphics site. You don’t need to go out and [...]

Seems I’m not the only one with something to say…

Provide information people expect. If you are an author and you are putting up a web page add a “News” section. In a fit of foolhardiness, actually call it “News”.

A website is a communications tool. Use it. Be clear, be concise and be obvious. Make sure [...]

Or, How Not to List Your Books in Such a Way as to Make Your Readers Rend Their Garments in Despair.

Another common question from the RWA talk: “What content should the site have?” Or, put another way, “What do readers want?”

I like this question. I’m going to talk about it at great length, but for [...]

A quickie while I get back up to speed: why contests are not effective promotional tools for authors.

Knowledge of web standards. A good, recent portfolio. Make sure that at least one site was done within the last calendar year. Someone you aren’t related to or close friends with.

Really, that’s about it. Web standards covers a lot — compliant sites tend to be accessible to the disabled (and Google counts as a blind visitor, by [...]

[For those coming in from Ma.gnolia, it might be helpful to know, until I get my category tags fixed, that this is part of my web design for authors series.]

The choice between designing a site yourself or hiring someone to do it for you is a lot like the choice between negotiating your novel contract [...]

In my cost overview I nattered on about Dreamweaver’s standards compliance and Frontpage’s lack thereof. There are a number of reasons this is important, and The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards summarizes them nicely.

Jeffrey Zeldman lays it on the line in 99.9% of Websites Are Obsolete. I’ll go out a little ways [...]

What qualifies me to tell you anything about the web

As I mentioned yesterday, you should pay no more than $10/month to host a typical, modestly successful site. Start with a basic package; you can always upgrade if you need more disk space than you anticipated or your site draws an unexpected amount of traffic.

Basic packages, because they are cheap, often come with a setup [...]

Last fall, my friend Sarah and I gave a talk on web design for her RWA chapter. We sent out a little survey ahead of time to find out what people wanted to know — and, implicitly, how much they knew about web design in general. (I didn’t think I was going to find much [...]