March 9, 2023
You may have seen many recommendations to create an author website as part of your marketing and brand awareness. How do you do that, and will it be a difficult or time-consuming process? The good news is that it’s much easier than you think. Here’s how to build an author website you’ll be proud to put your name on.
The first step in creating an author website is buying a domain name. A domain name is your address on the internet. You rent a space where you can “park” your author website under your own name. This service is known as “hosting.”
Several companies supply hosting services. When you build an author website, you pay a small amount yearly to use your domain name. This ensures that nobody else can use the same domain name for a website.
If you want a professional-looking author website, it’s best to use your name. That’s straightforward and simple. It also makes it easy for readers and others to find your site. You may want to give your author website a creative or artistic name, but this will make it hard for others to find you. Using your name means your site will come up when they do an internet search for your name.
If your name is Angela Barnes, choose the domain name AngelaBarnes.com or AngelaBarnesAuthor.com. If you have a long, complicated name that’s hard to spell, use just your last name or first name.
Once you have a domain name, you must find a hosting site. Then, you can begin building your author website.
Note: If you choose a do-it-yourself (DIY) website builder to create your author website, the builder will include a hosting service and will handle getting your domain name. You can take care of all these steps at one location and for one fee. We’ll go into more details in the next section.
DIY website builders allow regular people to design and build their own websites, even if they have no knowledge of coding and no technical knowledge. These sites have exploded in popularity because they allow you to have a professionally designed website up and running in a matter of hours. Whether you want to set up a portfolio or an online store, these DIY builders will help you get started.
In the past, building a website meant learning to code and building a site or hiring professionals to do the coding and design. It was costly and time-consuming. The arrival of WordPress made it easier for ordinary people to build their own websites, but WordPress has a steep learning curve. You don’t need to learn code to use it, but you must learn a specific site-building software. It could take several days to complete your author website using WordPress.
That said, many people like the flexibility and control they get using WordPress. Websites built with it are highly functional and very professional. If you’d like to maintain that control and don’t mind getting some hands-on technical work, using WordPress is a good option for you.
If, on the other hand, you don’t have any technical expertise and don’t want to learn these skills, a DIY builder is an ideal solution. These services come with hundreds of beautiful templates, drop-and-drag editing, easy setup, and the ability to build, design, and launch an author website in just a few hours. You can customize the templates, change fonts and colors, and add images with ease. They feature “what you see is what you get” technology that lets you see exactly what your site will look like.
These new DIY builders are much faster and easier to use than learning WordPress. They have made it easy for anyone to blog, and they’ve made it easy for anyone to create a well-designed, highly functional, site. Millions of people now use sites like Weebly, HostGator, SquareSpace, and Shopify to establish their online businesses.
When you use a website builder, everything is done online. Instead of downloading website building software onto your computer and building a site, you go to the DIY builder’s site, log in, and run your author website while you’re there. These services will also take care of hosting and buying a domain name.
These DIY builders typically have several subscription levels ranging from free to premium. They come with a free email address. If you want to expand your offerings later on, you can add extras like e-commerce features, lead generation, and payment processors.
As helpful as these website builders are, they have a few disadvantages that you won’t find on a professionally built site.
They limit customization. Although these builders have templates you can customize, there is a cap on the number of changes you can make to your site. There are limits to the amount of flexibility you’ll have on a platform designed to be easy for everyone to use. If you want a highly functional, totally customizable site, you must have it professionally designed.
You share hosting. You may see that these website builders refer to themselves as “shared hosting” sites or platforms. That means you’re sharing the hosting spot with all the other websites that use the DIY builder. This limits how big your website’s traffic can get. If you’re a small website, this is unlikely to be a problem. It will only become a problem if millions of people suddenly visit one of the websites on the shared hosting platform.
Here are some top website builders you can use to build your author website today.
Certain elements are standard to every professional website. Make sure you include these.
If you’ve been hesitant about building an author website on your own, we hope you’ve learned that it can be a fast, easy project. Plan to spend a couple of days building and fine-tuning your website. It’s an investment that will pay off. If you need help with any aspect of printing your book, talk to Publishing Xpress.
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