https://youtu.be/Fj2Nle1X0kc

Hi everyone, Trynda here.

Today, I wanted to bring you a video about web design since I went through college to be a web developer. I thought maybe it would be good to give some tips to writers trying to make their website for the first time.

So, I’m going to go to my website now and show you some things that I think might help someone who’s designing their website. So, I will see you there.

Ok. So, I’m here on my home page and this is probably what I would say is your most important page just because this is what everyone is going to see the first time they come here.

One thing you want to make sure you have is a nice big picture of yourself just so people see your face first and foremost because this is the you that you’re trying to sell.

Another thing you want to make sure you’re not doing is having a big wall of text. This is similar to how you would write a book blurb, you want to break it up into smaller by size chunks so they can get through it and digest it a little easier. I’ve put my tweets down below since that is my most active social media site, and also got my Bookbag just because I talk about my books and what I’m reading quite often. You could also put a Newsfeed or something else like that down just to give people a little bit more current up to date news about what’s going on with you and your writing. That’s something you can’t do, you don’t have to do, it’s all up to you what you put on your homepage but the one thing you want to make sure you have is a nice big picture of yourself and you want to make sure that you’re not putting a wall of text on your home page for people.

The next thing I’ll touch on is navigation. You don’t want to be making your website hard for people to go through. So, one example of this is my publications. I have a list of everything that’s been published so far but then, I also have pages for that individual item. So, instead of making people go to publications and then clicking to say Episode 1, they can just go and go straight to it from the menu. They don’t have to go and jump through hoops to get to that page. That goes for your homepage and your other pages as well. You want to be making people go to your publications page to get to Episode 1 when you can do that the same way with just inserting a link. It’s small things like that that make the usability of your website a lot better for people when they’re coming to read things. Another area you’re definitely going to want to have is something talking about your work. This could be anything from having a sample chapter displaying what you’ve worked on, I have my short stories and eventually, my novels will go up here as well. And I also have a paragraph talking about the novel that I’m currently working on, a novel I’m going to be working on and something that I haven’t actually completed.

So, I have a little bit of a broad scope in this but you could go into detail as little or as much as you want, it’s all up to what you want to put on your page but you should have something talking about your work just for people who aren’t following you on YouTube or Twitter and aren’t aware of what you’re working on.

The other thing I’m going to touch briefly on is if you have a blog. I don’t have a blog since I do YouTube but for those of you who do have blogs and you’re looking for a way to integrate it into your website properly, I suggest having a tab that links to it if it’s on a separate website but if you can’t, try and integrate it into your website itself. One thing with the internet is that people have very short attention spans so, the second someone has to click outside of your website, or go and search and search for something, you’ve already lost that reader. So, that’s something to keep in mind when you’re building that website. You want to keep people engaged on your site and not forcing them to go somewhere else.

The last thing I’m going to talk about is theme. You may have noticed that between my pages, I have a common theme that kind of translates between all of them and that’s a darker more historical feeling. And that’s because of the genres I write in, I’ve specifically made this website to reflect that. One thing I’ve noticed some authors doing is changing their theme depending on what book they’ve released, if it’s a romance, they’ll have more of a romance theme to their website, if it’s fantasy, they’ll have more of a fantasy theme to it or they’ll have the cover art even on the back of their website. That is something I’ve noticed but it all depends on how you implement it. I would say that it’s good to change it up every now and again, maybe every two to three years would be a good idea to change up how your website looks just so it’s fresh and it doesn’t feel out of date.

So, to close up this video, I’m just going to give you a few other quick tips that you can implement even if you’ve already got a website and maybe this is some stuff you’re lacking. Some things to keep in mind is to make sure you have social media at the top and bottom of your pages just so of someone scrolls all the way to the bottom looking at your content, they have a way to get to other pages without having to go all the way back to the top. One thing you also want to do is make sure you have a Contact Me page or a Contact form of some sort. I don’t have a whole page dedicated to it, I have just one little form, just to save space on my website and make it a little cleaner. Another thing you want to make sure you’ve got on your website is this main logo here and that could be your name or your logo for your publishing company. It really depends on how you make your website but this should be there. So, someone always sees whose website they’re on and this image should always link back to your homepage because that’s just a standard thing that every website has these days and that is something that you should be conscious of when you’re making your website.

So, that’s it for now guys. I’m going to put a link down below for a website that compares between Wix, Squarespace and WordPress and a few others so, if you’re not as code savvy as I am, you’re still able to create a website that works for you. If you’d like to share your own experiences or give some tips that I didn’t cover in this video, feel free to leave them down below in the comments.

If you like what you saw, make sure to leave a like and subscribe to my channel for more videos and I will talk to you guys later. 

Go Not Gently by Audionautix is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Artist: http://audionautix.com/