In the interim, find just one single positive quote from a satisfied reader or colleague to include on your home page. A single positive quote is powerful so you might want to keep one on your home page after you’ve created your Praise/Reviews page.5 About the Book(s): (Optional) More information about your book if you are not planning to create a book website. As time goes on, you can include a catalog of your earlier work, too.
Create Your Author Site with WordPress
Now we come to the technical side of building your website. In this section, we’ll give you the basics of putting initial content on your author website and publishing your site to the Internet.
Select and Register a Domain Name
Every website on the World Wide Web has a unique identifier, a uniform resource locator (URL). One of the best ideas of the web pioneers was to create the domain name system (DNS), which allows those URLs to have human-readable names like MyCoolSite.com. The thing is, that name also has to be unique, which, 30 years into the Web’s history, can be a problem. But given that humans haven’t run out of names for their children after tens of thousands of years, we’re confident you can find a unique domain name for your author website.
Here are some ideas:
Your own name: Use your own name—versus the name of your business or niche—if you have plans to write in more than one niche or genre. Using your own name is also helpful in establishing authorship, which in turn helps web search engines find you. Understand that you have to be first to register your name. Mike is always grateful that the former chief executive of Humana Inc. did not register MichaelMcCallister.com before he did, but suspects that some of his visitors come away disappointed. You can always use a middle initial, or Author<yourname> as alternatives.
Your business name: If you do freelance projects or have other business interests separate from your authoring niche, you may want to use a business name as your domain name.
Your niche: If you’ve carefully defined the subject matter that you’re expert in, you can register your niche as your domain name. This has the added benefit of coming up in “serendipity searches,” when a user looking for advice on solar-powered lawn mowers types in those words without spaces—solarpoweredlawnmowers—and finds your site without consulting a search engine.
As time goes on, you may decide you have the need for more than one website—or, when you really hit the big time, your publisher may decide to establish sites named for your individual books. But for now, focus your energy on developing your author website.
Most hosting companies will register your domain as part of your hosting fee, but before you agree to that, read the fine print and confirm that the domain is registered in your name (not the hosting company’s). If you don’t own the domain you select, you cannot change hosts and keep the domain.
You can also register your domain directly with an accredited registrar. GoDaddy, ENom, and Network Solutions are among the more popular U.S-based registrars, but comparison-shop rates and inclusions before committing; you can find a comprehensive list of registrars at internic.net/regist.html. Typically, domain name registration costs $10–$30 per year, and once you sign up you’re often offered incentives for renewing early or for multiple years.
Theoretically any computer on the Internet can be a host, serving up web pages to any browser that “asks” for them. In fact, we’ll be showing you how to set up a web server on your home computer later in this chapter. But if you don’t want to host your website on the same home computer as your financial records, works-in-progress, and other personal information, you’ll want to find a different host computer that will store your website, make it available to the public 24/7, and protect it from bad guys who try to take advantage of the openness of the web.
There are lots of companies out there who will provide hosting services, some more reputable than others. Many of these companies offer “free hosting” accounts, but if the server your site lives on goes down for whatever reason, you may have trouble getting help. Paying customers always come first.
Your Internet service provider (ISP) may offer you free or low-cost web hosting, and that may be the right thing for you.
Three things should factor into your choice of web host:
Amount of disk space: When you shop for a computer, you probably look at the amount of space that computer has to store your data. It’s the same for a web host. Fortunately, the text files that account for most of the content of a website are fairly small. Where you can run into storage problems are with graphics and audio and video files. Even so, with most sites, you can easily get by with three gigabytes (3GB) of space.
Bandwidth: This is the size of the “pipe” that brings data to and from your site. What you use in bandwidth depends on the size of your files and the popularity of your site. As with disk space, audio and video files take up the most space, and if you’re Stephen King or Stephen Hawking, millions will quickly download every bit of audiovisual material they can suck up. Hosting companies generally offer 25GB to 75GB of bandwidth every month. Some offer “unlimited bandwidth,” and if you pursue this option ask them how they handle sudden spikes in traffic (as when someone with millions of Twitter followers posts a link to your site). You don’t want the best day for your blog traffic to be the worst day for your bank account due to hidden charges or downtime as a result of a traffic surge.
Support for third-party software: Many hosts offer automatic installs of popular web content management systems like WordPress and Joomla. If you use one of these systems (this book will focus on using WordPress for your website management needs), you will also need support for the PHP scripting language and MySQL database management system. If you want to install WordPress yourself, you need to make sure that your host supports PHP and allows you to create and manage at least one database.
If you’re not sure where to start looking for a web host, the WordPress site offers a few recommendations at wordpress.org/hosting. These hosts handle a variety of website types (not just WordPress-based sites) at a reasonable price.
If you want special attention to WordPress issues and want a host that can easily handle large amounts of traffic, you might consider a hosting site like WPEngine that only hosts WordPress-based websites.
WordPress started out as another tool for blogging but has increasingly become a go-to platform for all kinds of websites. It really makes it possible for even the nontechiest of writers to create a professional-looking site, with zillions of choices available to you. Once you have your domain registered, a hosting contract agreed to, and some content ready to publish, you can have your WordPress site on the web and attracting visitors within an hour or two.
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