appear on screen sizes ranging from two-inch phone screens to 100-plus-inch big-screen TV monitors.
To cope with all these changes and simplify both the maintenance issues and the user experience, the movement for “responsive” web design—that is, a design that will automatically provide the best user experience no matter what type of device you’re using—has moved to the fore among the people who make the web. WordPress is no exception.
When you’re looking for a WordPress design theme, look for responsive themes, as they will give you the best experience for less effort. Searching the WordPress theme directory for “responsive” generates a list of more than 200 themes, so there’s no shortage of options. We recommend installing a theme you like and opening the site with a phone or tablet to see how your site looks. We’ve seen good results with the Responsive and Custom Community themes, along with the default WordPress themes. Depending on the theme, you may be able to adjust settings to get a better result. If you find a theme you really like that is not specifically responsive, you can also use plugins to achieve a better mobile experience. WPTouch works well for this.
Keep in mind … WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr all have mobile clients for viewing and posting to your site on the go. Check your phone/tablet app store to locate and install them.
Adding Widgets and More Plugins
All themes in WordPress enable you to install widgets in the web page sidebars that run alongside the main content on your page. Some themes support one sidebar, others two. To experiment with populating your sidebars with widgets, go to the Appearance area and find Widgets. You’ll see a list of available items, ranging from a calendar that helps your readers find your blog posts chronologically, to lists of recent posts and recent comments, to a tag cloud that offers a graphical assessment of the topics you cover. Just drag a widget from the list to the sidebar to add a widget to your site.
Don’t confuse widgets and plugins. Widgets almost always relate to the aforementioned kinds of features you add to your sidebars. Plugins, such as the social ones described above, often work behind the scenes of your blog and can provide a nearly endless supply of search engine optimization (SEO) tools, spam fighters, event calendars, and contact forms.
WordPress provides two plugins by default. The first is a toy called Hello Dolly. Click Activate and you’ll see a random lyric from the musical Hello Dolly appear on your administrative page. The other is more important: Akismet, a comment-spam fighter that is perhaps the biggest “must-have” plugin. Don’t set this up on your test site, but be sure it’s turned on for your live site. Akismet is free for personal use, and business licenses are inexpensive and worth every penny.
Website for author client Victor Villaseñor, author of the New York Times bestseller Rain of Gold.
Adding new plugins is very similar to the process for adding themes described earlier. From the plugin management page, click Add New to gain access to the free plugin directory at wordpress.org/extend/plugins.
While there are tens of thousands of free plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, the popularity of WordPress as a web content management system means that commercial developers have produced hundreds more premium plugins, offering more complex functionality.
Some of our favorite plugins are listed on our companion website, buildauthorplatform.com.
Best Practices for Website Content
In setting up your author website, remember to optimize these two kinds of content:
Static content is any content on your website that doesn’t change or changes very little over time, such as your author bio, contact information, and what your book is about. The section you are reading here addresses your static content.
Dynamic content changes frequently or is interactive and is great for searchability purposes. All you need is your blog entries and audience comments to form the dynamic content of your site. One beauty of keeping your blog on your site is that it reduces the necessity of bolstering your site with static pages; the dynamic blog keeps your site ever-fresh and highly indexable with Google and other search engines.
According to author client George Plumley, author of WordPress 24-Hour Trainer (Wrox, 2nd edition 2011), a key to maximizing WordPress content (and the same can be said of blog content created in non-WordPress sites, too) is to “keep your content split into the smallest possible pieces. That’s also part of what makes blogs highly effective: Break up content into individual pieces for easy managing.”
Website content works best when paragraphs and sentences are short and clear. Website usability guru Jakob Nielsen performed a study showing that usability increased by 58% by editing out extra words. Website viewers move quickly, so the value of your message must be condensed into the span of a glance. Since there is so much content on the web competing for our attention, we scan by habit, and web users tend to scan down the left side and read only a few lines to the right. If you understand the short attention span of viewers, you can appeal to this kind of speed reading in chunks. Here are the guidelines for creating effective author website content:
Get attention with your first words. Like a good speech, the opening impression of your website has to catch the readers attention and convince them to stay on the site, read more, and interact.
Get attention with attention-grabbing short subheads. Your viewers scan the headlines first, and many of them never get beyond reading the topmost half of the page.
Use lists. They help cut words and keep content scannable for the viewer.
Use only one single, readable font.
Leave enough horizontal space between sentences.
Keep ample margins on both sides. Remember to facilitate ease of viewing and reading. The reactive theme mentioned earlier in this chapter allows clear website readability on all sizes of mobile device screens.
Edit your content. Make sure your text is clear, jargon-free, and error-free.
Add an incentive to interact, such as an invitation to offer feedback, enter a contest or sweepstakes, or get something for free, like a sample chapter or excerpt from your book.
These techniques help lead your audience to an easy path to take action, that is, read your blog, engage and interact with you via your blog, look at the rest of your site, subscribe to your newsletter, and, ultimately, buy your book.
Use Keywords and Tags and Measure Results
When you identify your strategy and tie together the 14 steps of your author platform efficiently, your site continues to attract visitors for many years to come. The first nine months of your site’s life are the most critical to establishing your presence, so ensure that
