Case Study: Academy of New World Historians
…the Academy was founded to detail the story of how Fremont’s Children directed the outcome of the Making War. This is the incredible and unlikely story of how a brother and a sister, and other young heroes, created the balanced forces that drive us today. Although this is a tale of our past, it is still a story in the making. We uncover new bits of information regularly. We invite you to drop in from time to time to see it.
Brenda Cooper, co-author of Harlequin’s Moon with Larry Niven, contacted me a couple of months back, interested in how I might help publicize the release of the third book in her series, The Wings of Creation. I jumped at the chance to get involved.
The first thing I did was tackle the books. In this series, Brenda has built a strong cast of young characters and an interesting setting that is both recognizable and alien at the same time. They’re good “all ages” science fiction, and I really enjoyed them.
From reading the books, I suggested developing a website for the series as if the site was the digital presence of an actual institution in the world. The website would provide samples of the books for reading, and an encyclopedia of information–a kind of reader’s guide, if you will.
The Academy of New World Historians is the organization responsible for assembling the historical texts that make up Brenda’s series. Each book opens with excerpts of interviews conducted by these historians. The goal of the website is to share their publications with the rest of the Five Worlds.
The site is built on a WordPress framework, using a custom theme. It’s fairly straightforward in design and construction to reflect a culture that values simplicity and usability in interfaces. The design uses some jQuery effects here and there for some pizazz–I was really interested in trying out the “expanded navigation” method that I’ve implemented on the home page. You can hover over the section titles and see additional information for the section, such as links to specific topics.
Overall, Brenda has been a joy to work with. I hope you will all check out the site and her books. They’re good stuff, and I would recommend them even if Brenda were not a client.
September 7th, 2009 | Tags: client, web design
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Why Wordpress is the Perfect Platform for Author Sites
I get a lot of requests for help with WordPress lately (which I am happy to answer), and I’m making a good chunk of my money through my knowledge of the content management system. I thought today I’d give you some background on why I’ve made WordPress my go-to platform when designing author websites.
Broad Support and User Base
WordPress has one of the largest user bases of any content management system. Why is this a good thing? Well, it means that there’s a lot of community support. It means that if there’s a feature you want, there’s a good chance someone has already developed it as a plug-in (there are tens of thousands of plug-ins for WordPress). If you run into a bug or other problem, there’s a good chance that you can find someone else who has already experienced this problem with a Google Search. This all translates into fewer hours and more features for your author website. You get more for less.
What this also means is that rather than having to go out and buy expensive books to learn how to design WordPress sites, I have been able to learn everything I know from reading online. So I have less up-front investment (although still quite a bit of investment in mastering parts of it). Those savings get passed on to clients, ultimately.
Great Back-end Usability
The back-end of a site is the part that only the site author sees. It’s where you go to manage your content, write new blog posts, and so on. Because your readers never see this part of your software, you might be tempted to be satisfied with any old thing–that is, if you’re already a computer expert, and don’t have any trouble learning new interfaces. Not all interfaces are created equal. Now, WordPress hasn’t always had a nice, user-friendly back-end, but these days, it’s quite simple and beautiful. I enjoy spending time inside of the WordPress software, configuring things, and a good portion of my enjoyment is due to that.
And chances are, you’ve already used WordPress. A lot of authors have already used sites like WordPress.com to set up blogs in the past. So this means you spend less time learning an interface, and more time working on your writing.
Power Theme System
WordPress allows you to configure and lay out your site any way you want, and it does it through a straightforward theme engine with well documented template tags. Through a combination of plugins, theme writing, HTML, CSS, and judicious JavaScript, there hasn’t been a design concept I have come across that can’t be implemented in some fashion with the system. And using a good blank theme as a starting base, you can have a theme up and running from an HTML prototype very quickly. You dream it up, and I build it. It’s as easy as that.
A CMS, Not Just a Blog
Some people make the mistake of thinking that WordPress is just for blogs. That’s only a small part of what WordPress can do these days. With a few basic plugins, you can build just about any kind of Content Management System feature you might want. And most importantly to authors, it gives you a user-friendly way of managing and editing that content. Rather than having to spend money down the road paying your webmaster to update your site, you can do it yourself through the back-end. It’s a win-win for you and your webmaster.
Conclusion
So those are just a few of the reasons I use WordPress. I was very hesitant to adopt it early on because I had read a lot of negatives, but each one of those negatives has been addressed by the development team. Eventually, it made less sense to stick with an old warhorse like Movable Type and to move on and work with the younger, more dynamic WordPress. Since I made the move, I haven’t looked back.
August 25th, 2009 | Tags: authors, web design, wordpress
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10 Things Your Website Should Have if You Are An Author
1. Your own domain name.
In this day an age, a domain costs almost nothing, and hosting, not much more. I charge $15 a year for a domain and $20 a year for hosting for my clients, and there might be cheaper (but less feature-rich) hosting available out there. Sff.net might have been cool a decade ago, but it’s not now. It just looks unprofessional. Buy a domain, and if you can, make it your full publishing name. If you can’t, don’t get too clever, by which I mean don’t pick something you’re going to hate 10 years from now. Domain names can be changed, but you should really try to avoid it, to preserve your ratings in the search engines.
2. A biography and bibliography with lots and lots of links.
If someone is coming to your website, it is likely that they want to know who you are, and what else you’ve done. Don’t be stingy here. Don’t publicize anything you’re embarrassed of, such as that mpreg slash fic that you wrote late one night while drunk, but definitely include your bibliography, and if your story is available online, for free in a webzine or for sale in some form, link to it. If you don’t, you’re missing a chance for a sale to a potential fan.
3. A News Blog with an RSS feed. Or a newsletter. Or both.
Note that I said a News Blog. Writer blogs are great entertainment, but they are notoriously cluttered with nonsense quizzes, word counts, whining, and so much other crap that finding out when an author you like has a story coming out can be harder than it should. Maintain a clean weblog that is simply for announcing your sales, appearances, and other professional items of interest. Don’t use it to post pictures of your cats. I’m an RSS feed man myself, and I think they are the future, but perhaps you should do an email mailing list as well. Post the same content to both, but make sure it’s clear that they are the same information, so your fans don’t sign up for both and get irritated for receiving duplicate information.
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May 22nd, 2009 | Tags: advice, authors, web design, Writing
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