Posts Tagged ‘authors’

Case Study: The Five Worlds Website

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

…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.

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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.

Why WordPress is the Perfect Platform For Author Sites

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

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.

If you are an author, pub­lisher, or small busi­ness look­ing for a site built on WordPress, don’t hes­i­tate to con­tact me via Clockpunk Studios, my design com­pany.  I am avail­able to take new work on start­ing in early September.    I have a wide range of prices I can offer you, to fit many bud­gets.  We can build your dream site, or we can get you started with some­thing basic at your own domain very quickly, and add to that later.  So don’t assume you can’t afford it.  You might be sur­prised how cheaply you can get up and run­ning with your own WordPress-​​backed site.

Previous Advice For Author Websites (and some new)

Posted on: by Jeremiah Tolbert

This week, we con­tinue our trend of answer­ing ques­tions from read­ers.  Right now I have enough ques­tions to get me through at least another week of posts.  So BlueTyson asked in the post of ques­tions last week:

Not for me, obvi­ously, but ‘here’s how to con­sider doing a site about a book/​author’?

I have writ­ten about this sub­ject in great detail in pre­vi­ous entries, but it’s been a while since I’ve done so.  I’ll break things down into a few points, with links to pre­vi­ous posts:

  • First of all, hire me.  I’m avail­able, I work at a rea­son­able rate, and I know author web­sites well.  Some of my clients include Mike Brotherton, Jay Lake, Rudi Dornemann, Shannon Page, and more.
  • Plug out of the way, read this post: 10 things your web­site should have if you’re an author.
  • When con­sid­er­ing hir­ing a pro­fes­sional or even build­ing it your­self, I’ve writ­ten this arti­cle advo­cat­ing for good, standards-​​based design:5 Reasons Why SF/​F Author Websites should be (more) standards-​​based
  • At one time, your web pres­ence was pretty much lim­ited to a web­site and a blog.  Now, we have microblog­ging sites such as Twitter and social net­work­ing sites such as Facebook.  It behooves the seri­ous author to main­tain a pres­ence on each one of these services–basically any­where you might have fans, you should be.   One of the things I have started doing is, rather than just build­ing a web­site for an author, I attempt to develop a com­pre­hen­sive online strat­egy for them to develop an audi­ence and to main­tain their read­er­ship.  It’s about build­ing rela­tion­ships through the tools that are out there.  Your web­site is impor­tant, but it’s no longer the only impor­tant thing.
  • That may sound like a big time com­mit­ment, and it can be.  A good exam­ple is Twitter, which can suck up time like noth­ing else.  But you don’t need to post to Twitter 50 times a day to be avail­able and acces­si­ble.  Y0u need to answer ques­tions directed at you, make a few new com­ments each day, and respond to direct mes­sages.  Share your work, your­self, and your inter­ests on these ser­vices.   One thing I do is make man­ag­ing all these sites cen­trally very easy but installing plu­g­ins into the con­tent man­age­ment.   No longer am I just the guy who builds the web­site.  I also help you man­age all these tools.   A good designer/​developer/​web mas­ter will do so as well.

Remember: like any other busi­ness, you should think about what pur­pose a web­site serves, and what are your goals.  Everything about your web­site should reflect those goals.  It could be as sim­ple as “to sell books” or it could be com­pli­cated like “to share what I know about web design, pho­tog­ra­phy, and writ­ing. Also, cool links.  Also, to show­case my pho­tog­ra­phy and my designs.  To build read­ers for my fic­tion, but in gen­eral to make friends out there.”   Okay–so that vision isn’t very coher­ent, and could use some focus­ing.  I’m work­ing on that.  In the mean­while, you’ll still get every­thing but the kitchen sink.