WIP Wednesday And What I Learnt About Websites

As well as writing this week I have been working on all the other stuff they tell you that you should have in place ready for your first publication.  By they I mean the numerous articles telling you all about creating your online presence. I talked a little previously about setting up the newsletter, the first of which has now been sent and the lovely David Prosser gave me delightful feed back on.  If you are so inclined to sign up for next months please click here!!! And if you want a copy of this months feel free to shout out in the comments, personally I think the highlight was the fantastic butterfly photograph I shared via the newsletter. Sometimes you have to sing your own praises.

Next on my list of things to ‘fix’ was the website.  I have a very, very, valuable piece of advice, unless you are a computer genius do not rush this.  I designed my website using Wix, I started with the free site and then paid for my domain name etc and dashed about over excited posting things on it.  That is the WRONG thing to do! Before you start posting anything on anywhere take some time go through all the options and watch any and all tutorials they offer you. Had I done that I would have learnt about creating lists for news feeds so that instead of manually dragging every single item, image and headline about individually I could have just clicked the option of add item before.  I would have learnt I could lock items in place so I didn’t accidentally move them about while trying to do some thing else and I could have done it all properly the the first time and not wasted hours trying to make it work for me. If you have a minute click here and pop over and take a look at my newly refurbished website and then let me know what you think in the comments section.  The reason for a website is that it is a site specifically about just the books, that allows me to keep my blog as well and to maintain the chatty informal approach I prefer here.  Maybe if I become an incredibly famous author I might have to change that but it is highly unlikely, but after witnessing the carnage that #AskELJames turned into on Twitter I might be placed in a position where I was forced to, but that is a whole different discussion.

Hopefully though now I have it mastered, I just need to be sure to pop over now and update it weekly, that may become a Sunday task now I decided to take that day off blogging.  Right I think that is everything for this week I am sure by next week I will have discovered another aspect of preparing for launch day to discuss.