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Category: Site Development

I did not think about site development when I first, er, developed this site.

Site Development: Picture It: Sicily, 1912. No, Wait…

Maybe not that. And my apologies for the obscure and utterly unhip Golden Girls reference.

But still, let’s head on back to 2010, when I was first getting onto WordPress. And, truth be told, you can go back even further. Because, heh, yeah, I had a Geocities account back in the day. The day was, I am pretty sure, 1998 and beyond.

So, today, in 2023, that means that I have been keeping some form of a website for a good quarter of a century.

Sounds pretty impressive, when you think of it that way, eh?

Preparation? Plans? What Are Those?

With absolutely no idea of what I wanted to write about, I threw some photos online so they would be easier to retrieve. In that sense, the old account was rather helpful.

But eventually I started to think about blogging. I was on Blogger for a while there, too. I finally put money down with GoDaddy in, I am guessing, 2008? Maybe?

I first tried my hand at design but I honestly did not know what I was doing. At all. I learned some html and had enough knowledge to be able to do things like bold text. And… that was it.

I also had no idea about site structure.

How Does Site Development Fix All That?

I think it goes hand in hand with planning in general. Plan the work, and work the plan, as it were.

I’ve found it best to think of it a bit like an old-school traditional outline. You know, the kind that look like:

I.

A.

1.

a.

etc.

Your Roman numerals are your categories, really. And they are also your menu pages. The capital letters are content hubs. Now, WordPress does not do a great job with this unless you feel like paying for it, which I do not. But the idea behind a hub is that other posts and pages can kind of hang off it.

My universe explorations pages are hubs.

For the Arabic numerals, it’s the spokes of those hubs. For example, for the Obolonk hub page, some of the spokes are reviews of the books in it. Other spokes are character reviews.

The lower case letters aren’t much but I like to use them as connective tissue between hubs. A hub about covers should connect to a hub on editing. My hub on all the career stuff I do should connect to hubs on social media, Quinnipiac, and posts about any jobs I’ve held.

And so it goes!

Website PlansWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

Website Plans

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on July 6, 2023

Do You Have Any Website Plans?

Even if your site is a few (or several!) years old, it’s never too late to make some website plans.

When I was first getting around to creating my own website, I had no real direction or ideas. I just knew: hey, you need a website!

And so, Adventures in Career Changing was born.

But I have found that my site suffers from a lack of basic strategic planning. And so, here I am, to help you out and have you learn from my mistakes.

Because God knows I’ve made enough of them for both of us.

Templates and Advice

Dang, I wish this stuff was around when I was first tinkering around.

GoDaddy provides a very good framework for a website. But it is also rather basic. Although that makes sense. After all, GoDaddy exists for pretty much any type of website building. Novice or pro, GoDaddy wants to serve them all. Hence the planning info is sparse and generic.

It also (and I know this from personal experience) does not help if you are unsure about your site’s purpose, or it just plain changes. Since I didn’t want to start over from scratch, Adventures has changed with me.

But here are some ideas of my own. Take them or leave them, as always.

My Ideas of Website Plans and the Like

It may be hard to initially decide what you want a website to be about. Or maybe someone told you, “You’ve gotta have a website.”

So, if things are that vague, go contrary, and try to figure out what you don’t want your site to be about.

Because for me, that has stuck. One thing I have never wanted this site to be was/is purely a storefront. Now, I wouldn’t mind selling a bit through here. But this isn’t the website for the Stop ‘N Shop.

Personally, I am perfectly happy selling (or at least trying to…) through bigger sites like Amazon or Smashwords. Let them have the headaches of collecting sales tax and dealing with disgruntled customers and returns.

Separating Blogs from Sales

But then there’s the other side of the things, the pure blog site. Of course, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. This site has been just like that, and often for years at a stretch. This was particularly the case when I was in grad school.

But one thing about hosting, whether it’s via GoDaddy or elsewhere, is that it’s kind of expensive. If you don’t want to do anything but post, owning your own domain is likely to be overkill.

Why not just use Medium or Substack (although you can build a readership through them) or Tumblr? Or maybe just post at a forum or talk on Facebook?

Unless you’re writing stuff that’s controversial or likely to be yanked by a moderator (think NSFW stuff), you. Don’t. Have. To. Own. Your. Own. Domain.

At least, not to start.

A Happy Mixture of Website Plans

I like having both, and I feel there’s plenty of space in here for both. For any sites which publish thought leadership, that is exactly how they’re put together.

Well, now that that’s settled, what’s next?

Getting Into the Trees and Away From the Forest

Make a few decisions to start with. And do yourself an enormous favor from the beginning! Operate under the assumption that you will have less time, energy, money, and creativity, than you think you will.

This means that you should sit down from the very beginning and write out a bare bones skeleton covering whatever the heck it is that you want to write about.

Here’s an example.

Let’s say that your blog/site are going to be about dog training. Stake out your real estate, and decide where the fence is around your property. That is, decide if, say, food is outside of scope, but collars aren’t.

Whatever it is, make some choices. And don’t worry if you’re shutting yourself out! Keep a note about those extras and set that note aside for the time being. Why? Because limits can help to spur creativity and knock out writer’s block. But don’t throw that stuff out entirely. You may want it later.

Hence for our dog training blog, we might grab some old-fashioned paper and write down some ideas.

  1. Breeds
  2. Ages
  3. Rescues
  4. Strays
  5. Dogs with disabilities
  6. Collar types
  7. Leashes
  8. Kids and dogs
  9. Dogs and cats
  10. The two- or three-dog household
  11. Apartment living
  12. Legislation

Twelve ideas is great to start out! Now, let’s divvy them up. And keep in mind that an idea can come under more than one topic.

What the Dog is Like

The following ideas fit this category well:

  1. Breeds
  2. Ages
  3. Rescues
  4. Strays
  5. Dogs with disabilities

The Household

These ideas fit into this category:

  1. Kids and dogs
  2. Dogs and cats
  3. The two- or three-dog household
  4. Apartment living

Apparel/Training Tools

Here, the ideas that fit best are:

  1. Collar types
  2. Leashes

Dealing With Non-Owners

That is, dealing with people who might not love your fluffy hound as much as you do. Here, the ideas that fit are:

  1. Kids and dogs
  2. Dogs and cats
  3. Apartment living
  4. Legislation

This doesn’t mean the other ideas can’t fit. But on the surface, these work the best. So, out of our initial twelve ideas, we actually have fifteen ideas, in four separate sections. Sections are helpful because they add coherence to a site. You can make a series out of them.

For example, your series for apparel and training tools might look something like this.

  1. Prong collars—are they cruel?
  2. The best collars when you’re on a budget
  3. Are retractable leashes safe? An expert’s opinion
  4. How to get your puppy to walk on a leash
  5. Getting your children used to walking the dog on a leash
  6. Leash laws—an opinion
  7. Halloween costumes? Good idea, or not?
  8. Canine style: from bandannas to booties

These posts are divisible into collars, leashes, and clothing. The Halloween costume post is obviously great for late October.

Make Your Chief Website Plans to Capture and Grind Your Topics Into the Dust

Essentially what you want to do is, take your ideas and run with them forever. Run them into the ground, even. Now, while no one wants to ready a post on getting a four-year-old child to walk a dog on a leash and then a post about a five-year-old doing the same thing, there’s no reason why you can’t make those divisions a bit wider.

Maybe something on teenagers and dogs and responsibility, or teaching your preschooler how to properly walk your dog.

From our initial twelve ideas, we now have over twice that amount. And I’ve only really gone down one alley, the one with kids and dogs and leashes. Much like running a maze, run these alleys down. And, once you’ve finally hit a brick wall, turn around and run down the next alley.

Brainstorm and Brainstorm, and then Brainstorm Some More

Let’s say you take a trip into your local city or town, and you see someone carrying around a small dog in a purse. Aha! There’s a new idea, how to get a dog to enjoy being carried around in a purse. That might lead you to ideas about crate training or dog beds, too.

You’ve got a phone, right? So send yourself your ideas or use the notes app. If you’re driving, then of course either pull over or use voice recognition.

Ideas are everywhere. You just have to be looking for them, and then documenting them.

Make a Schedule

How often do you want to post? Or, rather, how often do you think you will want to post when you’re tired and burned out, and a few years have gone by?

Seven days a week is superfluous and really impossible to keep up with unless you have an army of helpers at the ready. So, aim for more like one to three times per week or so.

This blog, for example, is now down to Tuesdays and Thursdays only. I like this schedule as it’s easy to follow and remember.

Get Ahead

Remember what I said about not having time or energy or mental bandwidth? Getting ahead helps with that tremendously. When you have the time and the creativity and the will, go for it. There is no need whatsoever to stop after you have written one post. Maybe you have the time to write two—or five, even.

Remember what I said about a series of posts? If you have a few in the kitty, you can make choices about how a series can go.

Your Website Plans Should ALWAYS Include SEO/Keyword Research

I have written about SEO before, so I will not get too deep into it right now. But suffice it to say, if you are considering writing about, say, German Shepherds, do some keyword research. The best phrase might be German shepherd dog rather than just German shepherd.

Set Up Metrics as Soon as You Can

Use Google, whatever they are calling their analytical tools these days (GA Four? I don’t know). Claim your site and decide on what your goals are. Your goal might be a certain number of readers or a certain amount of time on page. Or it might be a number of pages visited in a session.

If you’re selling stuff, then one of your goals should be centered around sales, of course.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat With Your Website Plans

If you find that you get the most engagement with posts about chihuahuas, then write about them more often. If your opinion posts are less likely to lead to sales, write fewer of them, and spread them out, away from each other more.

Also, keep testing, over and over again. Maybe your post on Halloween costumes ends up being a massive hit. Well, Halloween only comes once a year. But there’s no reason why you can’t write about canine costumes for holidays like Christmas or Purim. Approach it from other angles if you can, so post an interview with a costume maker if you can.

Like I said, follow every idea to oblivion. And if you finally really do run out of ideas, update and rerun your older posts. Also, revisit those ideas you set aside as being out of scope. Maybe it’s time to extend your fence and put them in scope.

And finally, have fun with your website plans.

Woof!

Website plans show you how to blog for years if not forever!

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Website PlanningWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

Website Planning

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on July 4, 2023

What’s This About Website Planning, Anyway?

It would have been helpful if I had done some website planning, eh?

I suppose I should have planned my site better or maybe not just gone in and barreled my way in just to see what I could do.

I don’t think that’s truly awful as I have some ambitions but they feel very possible and within reach. And I look at my notes and I see – yes, I need to fix and put up Google Search. I need to play with keywords some more. I need to do … a lot.

SEO

And SEO! Oh my gosh. There’s a boatload to learn there and I’m still busy reading the books. I can’t recall who said that Time is Nature’s Way of making it so that not everything happens all at once. And I can live with that as an idea. It shouldn’t all happen in one shot. It should flow and develop.

Patience, a virtue. And sometimes an elusive one. But one thing is for certain — once a year elapsed, suddenly, I had a Google Page Rank of 3. Was that by design? Well, yes. But the science and art of getting a Google Page Rank of anything over zero is so obscure and unknown as to be akin to deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Now, I get that it’s all proprietary, e. g. intellectual property, etc., but c’mon! It gets silly after a while. Jigger this, don’t jigger that. Say this in some particular, special, magical fashion, and not in another.

Don’t Spam!

Don’t spam. Well, yeah, that makes sense. But people think of as proto-spam isn’t always. And what’s seen as non-spam, I suspect, sometimes is. I do recognize that Google is attempting to make rules to cover as many scenarios as possible.

And they wish to check out what people like I do by using computer algorithms rather than actual humans, in order to be somewhat timely when it comes to investigating websites.

But! It remains frustrating and, in my opinion, unnecessarily mysterious. A clue, s’il vous plait, and by that I mean a real one, by someone who is there and really, truly knows. The rest, it seems, are speculating, with varying degrees of accuracy and results.

I swear that figuring out how to get a good or at least decent Page Rank is harder than translating the Upanishads.

Strategy

Plus I’m developing my strategy. It will, I am sure, change. But I already have ways to promote what I’m doing. This is not quite like cliff-jumping because I had experience in promoting my Examiner articles (I was the Boston Extreme Weight Loss Examiner back in the day). Oh, look, some promotion!

Hindsight is 20/20 and Then Some AKA I Should Have Done Some Website Planning!

When I first started this site and this blog I had no idea about things. In fact, I didn’t know if I would continue with it.

But now, I can see that a lack of some basic website planning is a bit problematic. Currently, I am fixing a LOT of stuff.

Would I have less to fix if I had planned better? At this point, I don’t honestly know.

This is why I want to help others plan.

Hell, because if you can’t set a good example, you can always be a cautionary tale.

The Current Times and Website Planning

I looked back on this post, and on my site, and it’s hard to say what sort of shape planning could have possibly taken back in the day. So, I am going to update this with another post. Hold tight.

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How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website Speed and More UX DesignWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website Speed and More UX Design

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on June 15, 2023

As writers, we might not be thinking too much about website speed. But the truth of the matter is, we are all going to have to. But why?

Website Speed and You

Let’s get into the weeds just a little bit, all right?

Suppose you are looking at two separate websites. One is blazing fast, or at least it’s fast enough that you do not notice the pages loading or anything like that.  But the other one? Not so much.

All other things being equal, you are highly likely to hang around the faster site. In fact, you may even believe it’s better than the other one. Why? Because your experience is markedly better there.

Now let’s assume that the slow site is better. Maybe the content is better written, or the writers have more authority. Or the site just might be prettier.

If you could ever see it, that is.

The Wonderful World of the First Contentful Paint

Er, come again? The term ‘first contentful paint‘ merely refers to the first moment when a visitor can see anything on a screen on your site. It’s measured in, I kid you not, tiny fractions of seconds.

Yep, sports fans, the human race’s collective attention span is just plain that short these days.

Think of how quickly you scroll through notifications or click from one record to another. Do you play any video games on your phone or otherwise online? Then you’re probably moving quickly there as well.

But what, pray tell, does this have to do with the design of your writer website. After all, the people who are visiting are just interested in your stellar prose, right?

Uh, if you believe that, then I have an awesome deal on a bridge to sell you.

The Visual World

We are living in an intensely visual world these days. Add that to how fast everything moves, and you’ve got a recipe for flashing everything. Or so it may seem.

Website speed generally comes down to images. How fast do they load? And woe be unto you if yours load slowly.

What are the Worst Website Speed Issues Out There?

It all has to do with images. But more specifically, it has to do with how your site performs on mobile. While you may experience the internet on a desktop or laptop, most people aren’t. At least, not outside of work. Rather, they are experiencing your site (and everyone else’s site, from here to Pinterest or wherever and beyond) on tablets or phones.

In fact, there are a lot of people who don’t own a PC at all. They might just have a phone. Think that’s rare? Think again — it’s practically a way of life in a lot of Asia.

So, your site has got to perform well on mobile devices. And, since they are often less flexible than bigger devices, everything starts to slow down when you view it on a phone.

But the good news is that you can fix this stuff!

Fix Your Website Speed Issues

There are probably more ways to fix speed issues, but these three will help you quickly.

Your Theme is Sluggish

Some WordPress themes are great! They’re nimble, they look good on mobile, and they don’t sludge up your site with unnecessary code.

Others, not so much.

One of the reasons why a site is slow is because of far too much extra HTML and other code (e.g. JavaScript). If your site is slow, then do yourself a favor and seriously consider a lighter theme. Just Google (or check within WordPress itself) for a theme that’s light or fast. I’ve seen both terms used.

Often, your site doesn’t even have to change too radically. After all, you already have your content (or maybe you haven’t started with content, but it’s on your radar). Knowing that, say, you want a wide background image and a centered logo means you know what to look for when you’re browsing for a new theme.

This theme, by the way, is often free. You shouldn’t have to pay simply for someone to not lard up a theme with excessive code.

Your Images are too Large

This is so fixable it’s not funny! There are two ways to approach this. Use both of them.

As Pogo (satirizing Commandant Oliver Perry) said, “We have met the enemy, and it is us.”

If your images are too large, then shrink them either or both of these ways.

Crop What You’re Going to Crop, and Resize What You’re Going to Resize, Before Uploading an Image

WordPress will crop images for you. But the problem with that is, you end up with two versions—both cropped and uncropped. If you only want the one version, then do your cropping before you upload!

Same goes for resizing. If you have, say, a 1000 x 750 image and you really only want it to be 500 x 375, then, again, do your resizing offsite.

Compress Your Images Before Uploading Them

Now, there are plugins which will crunch your images. But CompressJPG does a fine job and it takes up no space on your site. Also, CompressJPG is utterly free, whereas compression plugins have limits.

Compressing does not hurt clarity and it doesn’t resize anything; it just makes the images fewer MB or KB than they were.

If you crop, resize, and compress your images, it will make a difference.

You Have Pages With Low Text to HTML Ratios

Er, what?

Text to HTML ratio means that you have a certain number of characters devoted to content, and a certain other number of characters devoted to all the HTML used to render those characters and also prettify your site.

SiteGuru has an excellent free (and it seems to be unlimited!) tester. Just pop in the URL you want to check, and click the button that says Test. A ratio of 20% content versus 80% HTML is good. Anything below that for content is not so good.

How do you fix this? Either remove HTML (which is what you do when you use a lighter theme) or write more verbal content or both. In particular, if you have an image anywhere but the featured image, it’s going to use HTML to render. Taking out that image will help your ratio.

Now, I don’t want you to have a boring, flat site. But at the same time, if the image is superfluous, then nix it. And, of course, do the above—crop, compress, and resize—if you really want to keep it.

Oh, Yeah, There’s a Fourth Way to Easily Improve Website Speed: Don’t Get All Plug-In Happy

Plugins add HTML. Some of them even add HTML to every single page, even if you can’t really see them or what they are supposed to be doing. Think about what you need, and determine if you can get away with less. And, just like with WordPress themes, look for plugins that are lighter and/or faster.

There’s more than one plugin for creating a newsletter, for example. If they are all more or less fulfilling your needs, then pick the one which gets the job done with the least amount of HTML.

Takeaways

Check site website speed regularly, and check HTML ratios as well. Both will help you to not only speed up your site but write better and go into more depth.

Congratulations! You’re now creating, designing, adding to, and using your site in a way that is designed to best serve the most important person of all—you your ideal customer.

Want More of Writer Website Development?

If my post on website speed resonates with you, then be sure to check out my other articles about how to create a writer website.

Writer Website Development

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Fix your site speed and get going the smart way! #amwriting

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How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website User Experience DesignWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website User Experience Design

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on June 13, 2023

Whether you’re just starting or are updating an older author website, writer website user experience design is something you must consider.

Fer realz, yo’.

How Writer Website User Experience Design Can Help or Hurt You

Do yourself an enormous favor, and Google the placement office at your alma mater. If you didn’t go to college, then any local college or university will do. The name might be something like career development.

I am a ridiculous overachiever and have the oddest resume you are ever going to see. So, I have three alma maters, heh. Let’s look at them in turn (but what does this have to do with writer website design, I hear you cry. Trust me, you’ll see).

Boston University

The BU Center for Career Development has of course changed a lot since I graduated. Which was before a lot of people were born, 1983. Colors are bold and it’s pretty easy to find stuff. BU also knows their audience. It’s a large university, over 100 years old, and has a variety of schools.

Just appealing to undergraduates would alienate alumni returning to look for work. Still, there’s no doubt that undergraduates are the main focus. If I wanted to look for work via BU, I would probably go straight to their alumni association—yet there’s no link or suggestion thereof.

I’m just left to founder.

Well, that kinda stinks.

I’d give BU a 3/5. What is there is very easy to read and navigable. But they are utterly neglecting a good chunk of their audience, and not even giving us an escape hatch.

Widener Law School (Delaware Campus)

The Widener Career Development Office has a rather different focus, as there are no undergraduates. There are certainly undergrads at Widener, but they aren’t at the law school. And, the jobs the Widener office is going to send people to with inevitably either be private practice, JAG Corps (the military), or something academic.

There may be a few government agency jobs sprinkled in there. Also, because it’s a regional type of school, jobs will most likely be in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey. There may be a few in Maryland or New York. And if there are any federal jobs, then they’ll be in DC. But if you want to work in Indiana, you’re out of luck.

Notice anything else?

The font is larger than it was for BU, and it’s a serif font, whereas BU was sans serif.

Widener knows their audience is older, certainly at least about 20 years old (more likely to be closer to 25 at the youngest), whereas BU may have some audience members as young as 16. Also, Widener probably figures most people will read their site on a laptop or desktop. At BU? Tablets or phones.

I’d give Widener a 2/5. While it does account for user age and perhaps sensibilities, I didn’t see any way to get to any jobs! You have to click on students before you get to any place with jobs. If you click on alumni, the message is about mentoring and recruiting.

Hence the assumption is, you’ve already graduated so, you don’t need to look for work. Would that it were so easy, Widener.

Quinnipiac University

The QU Career Development Office is a lot more image-heavy. It’s another sans-serif site, and the font is smaller, like for BU. There isn’t a lot of information on the front page, but that’s by design.

Rather, you scroll down and you’re given a choice of six schools and their College of Arts and Sciences. You can go straight to the appropriate placement office from there. But once there, there’s not a lot beyond telling you to contact the director.

While there are listings to tell you where people have landed, you have no names or contact info. So, knowing someone ended up at Apple, for example, is lovely. But, what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?

As an alum, I had to back out of the CDO and go to the home page for QU, click on alumni and then on career development, and then, finally, job postings.

And then I had to choose QUCC or an external link that ended up not working. Not a good look, QU.

I would give QU a 3.5/5. Triaging people by school was smart, but there was no accommodation for us older folks who might have less than stellar eyesight.

Writer Website User Experience Design is About Accommodations

For all three schools, the web developers did a decent job with functionality. Nothing was slow. Yet there were places where all three could improve.

Hiding what the readership was looking for was a problem for all three schools. Seriously—when I go to a placement office, I want to see jobs. At the barest absolute minimum, there should have been a way to sign up for notifications or to get into the system.

And that information should have been front and center. It was a use case that all three schools missed entirely, the concept of an alum out of work or a student over the summer, who just wanted to look for a job. No talk of careers or callings or majors.

Just. A. Job.

What really irks me is that these schools all have good budgets. So, why didn’t they do any better?

The Writer Website User Experience Design on YOUR Author Website

Most of us indie writer types do not have access to any sort of a meaningful budget. And, if we do, it’s likely better spent on cover designs, editor services, and paying for hosting, or for swag and accommodations for events.

So, you’re probably not going to be doing any sort of user experience testing. But that does not mean you cannot perform some thought experiments. Come with me, if you will.

Buyer Personae

Who is your ideal reader? Who buys your stuff? And, if you’re not selling yet, who do you think would buy it? This is  beyond your family, close friends, and fellow authors doing trades.

Name this person, and give them a face. Give them demographics. Here’s mine.

Meet Amy Shapiro

Amy Shapiro is a science fiction fan who’s older than the standard college crowd but still somewhat identifies with them (she’s between 35 and 70). She is college-educated and probably has three or fewer children, if any. She’s either married or in a long-term relationship. Her sexuality is more likely to be straight but she might be bi.

Amy is Jewish although not strict and does not keep kosher. But she does see that depictions of people just like her tend to be one-dimensional.

Where are the Jews in space?Alicia Silverstone (to depict buyer persona Amy Shapiro), to illustrate writer website user experience design

Amy loves sci fi but she still finds it hard to see herself on the page or the screen. After a certain age, women fall off a cliff in Hollywood, Sigourney Weaver and Carrie Fisher notwithstanding.

She also wants something unique and different, and is willing to read a number of different kinds of plots.

Amy is comfortable with some sex scenes, even explicit, if they aren’t gratuitous. The same is true of violence, but gore makes her squeamish.

This image (from Wikipedia, so it’s a creative commons license and therefore okay to use) is of actress Alicia Silverstone, a nice Jewish gal who was born in 1976 and fits the model perfectly.

Use Cases

I alluded to this already, but now let’s get more specific. A use case is essentially how you think a person will use a particular product or service.

Of course, people who buy books intend to eventually read them. So, I’m not talking about use cases for books. Rather, I mean use cases for your writer website.

Writer Website User Experience Design — Appropriate Use Cases

Why do people go to author websites?

What do they want to accomplish? What can they get there and nowhere else, online or off?

I believe the following use cases exist for my site. Most of them probably do for yours (or will) as well:

  1. Customers who want to buy my books
  2. Fellow indie writers (just like you!) who want to discuss and learn about the craft
  3. Fans looking to personally connect to me
  4. People who want to learn about using social media and some web design (mostly intersects with #2, but not 100%)

Buyers

This is a group who, I will be first to admit, I am not serving well. But they’re the easiest to serve. They need links to buy, a shopping cart, ways to pay, and a means to check out and go home (figuratively) happy.

Craft Discussers

These are people I serve with posts like this, but also posts about inspiration, plotting, editing, and beta reading.

Fans (hi!)

For fans, the more personal ways I serve them are with self-reviews and progress reports. They want to know what I’m working on, and I like to think they want to know how I feel about that as well.

Social Media/Web Design Students

Posts just like these serve this group. So do a lot of the book reviews I’ve done over the years. I’ve read a ton of books on social media, etc. These folks want to know if those reads are worthwhile.

Takeaways for Writer Website User Experience Design

I know Amy is a buyer/fan, or at least I would like her to become one if not both. To better serve her, I need to set up sales, a thing I have not done yet.

Here are takeaways for you:

  1. Consider your ideal reader/customer and how you can appeal to them
  2. Why do you believe they are coming to your author website? Offer them what they want and need
  3. Take the time to determine who your ideal buyer persona really, really is (yes, I’m repeating myself, but it’s that important)

Who’s your Amy?

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How to Create a Writer Website: Mobile DesignWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Mobile Design

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on June 8, 2023

No matter how much you may be used to using a laptop or a desktop computer to go to websites, that does not mean your website visitors will do the same. You have got to take mobile design into consideration.

Good Mobile Design is Imperative Because Phones are Everywhere

It is not just that they’re everywhere. It’s that so many people use their phones to surf the internet.

Statista says, in 2020, the number of mobile phone search users in the United States was 211 million. And, in 2020, according to the US Census, there were 311 million people in America. Note: the census data is for April 1, 2020, which is around when Covid started to really hit.

But you say there are 100 million people not using cell phones for search. Yep.

But there are very young children and very old folks in that group of 100 million. There are people who are comatose, and people who don’t understand how to use a cell phone. Plus there are folks who don’t have cell phones at all, and people who would use a phone for search but don’t want to use data on a limited plan.

So, they’re not all die-hards who are digging their heels in and refusing to use their phones for search.

Oh, and consider that there are parts of the world where phones are a lot more popular than computers. Lots of Asia is like that. If your readers are there, then you really need to be working on mobile design for your author website.

But it’s More Than Just Search

What happens after you find something online? On occasion, you might take note of it or bookmark a page. But the vast majority of the time, you go to that site.

What if your site looks awful? And not just in a design way. Rather, in an unusable way.

To be fair, this article from Search Engine Journal is from 2013. I would hope most of the offenders would have pulled their socks up by now.

But the image below isn’t just of a lousy mobile design experience. It is also, it would appear, a site which hasn’t been updated since (a conservative estimate here) 1987.

Search Engine Journal example of bad mobile design
Search Engine Journal example of bad mobile design – please, make the pain stop!

That’s … pretty dang terrible.

It All Goes Together in a Great, Big Design Stew

So, the metaphor (or is it a simile?) sounded better in my head, okay?

Yet the principle is still there. That is, that a writer website has got to have good overall design and navigation. But it also needs to provide a good user experience.

And it also must serve mobile search well.

Thank God for WordPress

No, seriously, they don’t pay me. I just think they’re pretty dang awesome.

You can accomplish the overall design (of any sort) of a WordPress site through the use of themes.

A theme can make your site pop, or it can make it look odd if you pick a theme that doesn’t handle your kind of site well.

Fortunately, WordPress does their best to separate the wheat from the chaff. And, themes are searchable.

So, search for a theme that’s mobile-friendly.

You can run the search either within WordPress or on Google or Bing.

These are the terms you should use for your search:

mobile friendly WordPress themes free

You may or may not want to add the word responsive to that search. And adding the word light can be helpful as well. By that, I don’t mean light in color. I mean light on HTML usage.

The problem isn’t finding one of these themes. It’s in selecting the one that you believe will serve your needs the best. WordPress absolutely spoils you for choice.

Clickable Elements and Google Search Console and Mobile Design

Er, what?

I have seen this problem before, and on more than one website. Google Search Console is owned by Google and it is how (with notifications that can hit your email) it tells you if there are problems with your website—including in its mobile design.

One issue I have seen before is “clickable elements too close together”. Putting a bunch of anchored links close together on a post can potentially do that.

Take note of these errors if you see them, and work to fix them. Sometimes that means moving an image or a link.

But if it persists, you may want to shift to another mobile-friendly theme. And do the designer a favor and tell them! They may have a workaround you can use.

Takeaways for Writer Website Mobile Design

Here are three takeaways on author website mobile design:

  1. More people than ever before are using their phones to surf the internet, search, and buy things—things like your books
  2. WordPress has a ton of mobile friendly themes. If you don’t like one, you can always try another of over a hundred (thousand?) others
  3. Google thinks Mobile First and will ding you if your site isn’t good for cell phone use—so fix any usability issues as soon after you learn of them as possible

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How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website DesignWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website Design

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on June 6, 2023

If you’re going to have an author website, you should probably be looking at writer website design. Don’t leave it all to chance (like, er, some of us did, cough, cough).

Writer Website Design Can Help or Hurt You

Without getting into user experience (which will be the subject of a different blog post), there are definitely things you can do with writer website design that can help you.

Or hurt you.

And I will also write about designing for mobile in yet another blog post, so I will try not to get into that here too much, either.

So, rather, let’s talk about (er, it’s only me ‘talking’, but you know what I mean) organization.

Location, Location, Location

Have you ever gone to a website (and it does not have to be for an author) and looked for something, and it just plain wasn’t there? And it wasn’t that it was absent—which of course can happen to anyone in any site. Instead, it was just in some odd place.

It’s a little like finding salsa in the Italian foods section of your local supermarket.

Hey, I’m glad I found you, oh little jar of delicious salsa. But why aren’t you with your friends, the taco shells?

See what I mean?

Like Should be Together With Like

This is almost Marie Kondo level stuff.

Consider your book(s) and your blog posts, whether they are written (or even posted), or not. When you have had a blog for a while, you may need to add some menu navigation to the front page.

Let’s say, for sake of argument, that you write both horror and stuff for kids.

Er, don’t confuse the two.

You might call one menu The Spooky Nook, whereas you might call the other one Happy Books for Happy Tots. And never mind that it would likely be better if these were in two separate websites.

With WordPress, you would do this with categories, and with placing the menus where you feel they work the best.

Obviously, you make sure your horror goes to the former menu while your kids’ stuff goes to the latter.

But what about things that are in the middle? Or maybe they don’t really fit either?

First off, not everything must be in a drop-down menu format. So long as a blog post is accessible somehow, through a link on some other page, you’re good. The easiest way to make certain of that is to use tags.

Tags are for Aggregation. They Also Work as a Kind of Sneak Preview

Every time you make a tag, WordPress (and I believe Blogger may do this as well) creates a page. And, perhaps somewhere, a developer gets their wings.

But the idea behind tags isn’t to make a million of them for every occasion. Unlike with some other things, such as blog content (with exceptions), reusing is just fine. In fact, it’s downright necessary.

If your tags are visible in your theme, they will be clickable links. A site visitor will click on one, say, called children‘s books. If you are using the identical tag for all twenty (we can dream, now, can’t we?) of your children’s books, they will see everything you have on offer.

And, they might see something in your back catalog that they didn’t know about before. And may want to buy it.

But if the tag only points to one book, and another tag, called kids’ books, points to one different book, and another tag, preschoolers’ books, only points to a third book, do you see the problem here?

Your visitor has to go through three separate screens. For twenty books done up this way, you guessed it, they’re now saddled with having to go through twenty screens. Which is silly.

Is using synonyms good? It probably is, because you’re accounting for more than one type of search. The preschoolers’ books tag, in particular, is really good, because that’s a well-defined subset of children. Someone looking for a book for a teenager will know not to click there.

But how do you fit in synonyms without making visitors jump through too many hoops?

Tags are Your Friend but They are not Your Bestie

The simple solution is: use more than one tag. But at the same time, don’t go overboard. There is no need to dig through a thesaurus, hunting for obscure synonyms so you can make yet more tags. But do some research, and that means pulling up Google and trying it out for yourself.

When you search for children’s books, how many hits do you get? Beyond the ads, what are the first three results? Now do the same for kids’ books. The day I wrote this blog post, I found children’s books (no quotes or anything) got me 884 million results.

But kids’ books got me 10.9 billion hits.

While the top three results were in slightly different orders, they overlapped. These sites are using both. You should, too.

But a search for the much more obscure striplings’ books got me books by author Scott Stripling. Not even close.

For a book on the kids’ side devoted to dinosaurs and easy to read, you might tag it something like:

kids’ books, children’s books, dinosaurs, easy reader

You might tag a book for children about divorce something like:

kids’ books, children’s books, divorce, separation

Depending on the second book’s focus, you might also tag it legal or mental health, etc.

But You Just Said Tags Aren’t Your Bestie

I sure did. What I mean by this is: getting too granular isn’t helpful because it won’t aggregate. Hence the book on dinosaurs just gets a dinosaurs tag and not a stegosaurus tag—unless you have enough books on the stegosaurus where it would justify it.

Being too tag-happy doesn’t look good. It just looks amateurish and spammy.

Use a half-dozen rule of thumb.

Therefore,

  • No more than 6 tags per post and
  • If you have 6 usages or planned usages for a tag, great! Otherwise, don’t make a new tag—but see below

Exceptions are of the Devil and We’d Better Deal With Them Now

A meaningful exception to the 6 usage rule is when a topic is so exceptionally unique that you can’t use another, similar tag as a replacement.

Case in point: the 50 states. Try as you may, putting the tag for Oklahoma on a blog post about Idaho is just weird and unnecessarily confusing. Or, you can avoid the issue entirely and just create a tag called America or USA or US states, something like that.

I would also say that a very long book (as in, over 100k words, edited) can get a few extra tags if it’s justified.

Here’s an example: my book, The Real Hope of the Universe. It’s the last book in the Real Hub of the Universe trilogy. Plus people love the main character, Ceilidh O’Malley.

Tags can probably look like (I haven’t checked mine, but they’re likely to be close to this):

Real Hub of the Universe, Victorian era, science fiction, Victorian sci fi, Ceilidh O’Malley, Jake Radford, Devon Grace

I may not need the two extra names at the end (they are also significant characters, but it’s Ceilidh’s POV all the way).

Easy, useful, and no overkill.

Odds and Ends for Writer Website Design

WordPress does this beautifully but, if you’re not using it, you should consider this.

Make sure all navigation is where the visitor would expect it to be. For example, settings and accounts tend to be in an upper corner. Putting them in the middle of a page is just asking for them to be ignored/unseen. Yes, even though they are quite literally front and center.

Keep buttons, etc. consistent and use naming conventions. For our children’s author example, boys’ books and girls’ books and nonbinary books go together. But books for boys (assuming the other two stay the same) is inconsistent.

If a website visitor finds your site via your nonbinary books page (or tag or category), they will reasonably guess that reading material for boys will be called something like boys’ books. They’re a lot less likely to guess books for boys. You should, though, be using both terms on the page. But you only need the one tag like that.

Consistency and naming conventions will make your life easier, too. You only have to dream up the general concept one time.

Takeaways for Writer Website Design

Of course, there are many, many more things I could say about this. But here are three quick takeaways on the topic of writer website design:

  • Do some research to find out which words people are using when searching for books and a site just like yours. Use those words as keyword phrases (covered in my SEO blog posts), blog titles, and category and tag names
  • Keep in mind a rule of 6 for the number of tags per post and the number of times a concept repeats on your site before you create a tag for it—but be mindful of some exceptions
  • Consistency and naming conventions will save you and your readers time

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How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website CopyrightWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer Website Copyright

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on June 1, 2023

Even if you aren’t a litigious sort of person, you will still do well to concern yourself with writer website copyright. Just because you, personally, don’t go searching for plagiarism and copyright violations, doesn’t mean that they won’t find you.

Writer Website Copyright: The Basics

If any of this looks familiar, it’s because I have other posts on copyright. And, let’s face it. It really hasn’t changed that much. But it does bear repeating all the same.

Writer Website Copyright - definition courtesy of Investopedia
Copyright definition courtesy of Investopedia

The Elements of Copyright

According to the US Copyright Office,

Copyright is a form of protection provided by the laws of the United States (title 17, U.S.Code) to the authors of “original works of authorship,” including literary, dramatic, musical, artistic, and certain other intellectual works. This protection is available to both published and unpublished works.

Per Section 106 of the Copyright Act of 1967, a copyright holder can:

  • reproduce the work in copies or phonorecords
  • prepare derivative works based upon the work
  • distribute copies or phonorecords of the work to the public by sale or other transfer of ownership, or by rental, lease, or lending
  • perform the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and motion pictures and other audiovisual works
  • display the work publicly, in the case of literary, musical, dramatic, and choreographic works, pantomimes, and pictorial, graphic, or sculptural works, including the individual images of a motion picture or other audiovisual work
  • perform the work publicly (in the case of sound recordings) by means of a digital audio transmission

Hence copyright holders have any number of rights in their own works. Can they allow others to use them? You betcha! We call that a license.

When do Copyrights Expire?

Not surprisingly, the US Copyright Office has something to say about that.

In general, for works created on or after January 1, 1978, the term of copyright is the life of the
author plus seventy years after the author’s death. If the work is a joint work with multiple authors,
the term lasts for seventy years after the last surviving author’s death.

I won’t go into works created before January 1, 1978 (you can check out the pamphlet for that). Since it’s a good 45 years ago, many currently living authors don’t have anything that old.

Er, What?

What does this mean? Well, the short answer is that you generally do better to publish your work! After all, you can’t expect anyone to guard against copying it if they don’t know it exists.

The other important takeaway: you don’t need to assert copyright or mail it yourself or anything like that. Does it help to register your work? Absolutely! And you’ll need it to defend a lawsuit. But mailing it to yourself is silly. Seriously.

Infringement and Writer Website Copyright

We are artists and that means we are copyright holders, even if we never assert our rights and never file with the copyright office. According to American copyright law, you own it if you made it. You don’t have to mail it yourself.

But to defend a case, in the US, you must register your work. In fact, the registration is a prerequisite to actually taking someone to court for infringement. Thank you, copyright attorney extraordinaire, Michael Stewart!!

Infringement

Here, however, I will only talk about American law. If you assert copyright in another country, the law will most likely differ. Furthermore, if you have any questions, ask me in the comments section. I will try to research and answer you in a timely fashion. But don’t expect me to do the huge amount of research a hired lawyer would. Nope. I am not doing that much free work for you, sorry, not sorry.

Or ask a copyright attorney. This area, like many areas of the law, has nuances and there can be changes. This blog is no substitute for good advice from an experienced lawyer. If you think you need to protect your rights, then do so properly. And that means hiring an attorney.

Yes, you will need to actually pay that person.

Details

The American Bar Association explains it better. It publishes a Young Lawyers series to help newly minted lawyers understand the nuances of complex sections of practice. So the ABA explains:

An action for copyright infringement may arise where a third party violates one or more of the exclusive rights granted to copyright owners. To establish infringement, the plaintiff must prove: “(1) ownership of a valid copyright, and (2) copying of constituent elements of the work that are original.”

Ownership of a valid copyright consists of: “(1) originality in the author; (2) copyrightability of the subject matter; (3) a national point of attachment of the work, such as to permit a claim of copyright; (4) compliance with applicable statutory formalities; and (5) (if the plaintiff is not the author) a transfer of rights or other relationship between the author and the plaintiff so as to constitute the plaintiff as the valid copyright claimant.” A copyright registration certificate from the Copyright Office serves as prima facie evidence of elements (1) through (4). If the defendant rebuts the plaintiff’s prima facie evidence, then the above elements of valid copyright ownership become essential to the plaintiff’s case.

So what is the ABA is saying? Registration with the US Copyright office is necessary to successfully bring an infringement claim. If you think your work might be infringed upon, if you feel it is a danger and you are concerned about it, then get some peace of mind and register it with the US Copyright Office.

Are There Any Writer Website Copyright Exceptions? Or Any Copyright Exceptions?

I am so glad you asked.

Purdue University offers a terrific and very readable summary of the main known exceptions to copyright infringement claims.

Fair Use

For the fair use defense, Purdue outlines four basic factors:

Purpose and Character

Some specific use cases favor fair use. These include nonprofit, educational, and personal uses. Plus there are those which represent a potential tipping point.

These include teaching, research, scholarship, criticism, commentary, and news reporting. And there are those which favor needing permission. These include commercial, entertainment, and for-profit uses.

Hence, a nonprofit’s research is more likely to be fair use than a for-profit enterprise’s commercial use. Hence the for-profit business should seek the copyright holder’s permission.

Nature of Work

To favor fair use, it should be a fact and/or published. But to favor needing permission, it should be a fiction and/or unpublished. E. g. It’s more likely to be fair use if you repeat a published fact about dinosaurs. Whereas you more likely need permission for an unpublished novel about vampires.

Amount

Small and insignificant bits of copying are more likely to be fair use than large ones representing a work’s heart. As a result, those are more likely to require permission.

Hence, if I copy the character of Millicent Bulstrode, then the character is minor and small. But this does not necessarily mean JK Rowling won’t sue me. Still, copying Hermione Granger is another matter entirely.

Market Effect

You’re more likely to be in the fair use realm if:

  • Licensing/permissions are unavailable or there is no major impact,
  • There is limited/restricted access to the work, or
  • The user or institution owns a legal copy.

But it’s different if there is a major impact, or licensing/permissions are readily available. Or the work has worldwide availability, or there is repeated or long-term use. Then the scale slides to requiring permission.

Profit and sales are not an element to this cause of action. Although selling the copied article, particularly multiple instances of it, can place the act into the ‘requires permission’ camp.

Face to Face Instruction

According to Purdue,

The traditional classroom or face-to-face instruction is when the instructor and the students of a nonprofit educational institution are in a place devoted to instruction and the teaching and learning take place at the same time. In this setting all performances and displays of a work are allowed.

Requirements:

  1. All materials must be legally acquired.
  2. Teaching activities must take place in a classroom or a similar place devoted to instruction.

Exceptions: Virtual Instruction

Like face-to-face instruction allowance, virtual instruction generally gets a pass, per Purdue University. However, there are some specifics. For example, the class must be a regular offering in the curriculum.

What About Parody?

The American Bar Association notes the United States Supreme Court treats parody and satire separately. But the ABA feels it’s a distinction without much of a difference. Both are mockery. But satire is often more like commentary than outright mimicry.

For the ABA, and particularly when a work has both elements, the difference matters less. Although copyright holders might be more likely to license satire rather than parody. This is because parody is pretty much a knockoff by definition.

Commentary generally falls under fair use. That commentary can be amusing or not, satirical or not. Copying generally isn’t fair use. But amusement and exaggeration blurs that line.

The best advice I can give you is: don’t make your work into a copyright test case.

In other words: be original!

Writer Website Copyright: Takeaways

Beyond protecting your own work and trying not to get into your own copyright hot water, there is the matter of someone out and out pirating your stuff. This happens with annoying regularity. DMCA takedown notices can be semi-effective, but determined thieves likely will not care about your rights.

A few ways to protect yourself include using PDFs for review copies or beta reader copies, and not Word docs or Google docs. With those, copying is still possible, although you need software to do it.

If you are published through a publisher (traditional or hybrid), talk to their legal department about what they do, and how you can potentially help them. But if it’s just you, you may want to resign yourself to the fact that it can turn into just so much Whack-a-Mole.

Give pirates and infringers no quarter. But at the same time, don’t let them run your life so much that you have no time to write.

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How to Create a Writer Website: Writer SEOWeb design, Start a Writer Website, Writer SEO, Writer Website Design, Writer Website Copyright, Writer Website User Experience Design, Mobile Design, What to Write About, Website Planning, Technology to Help You With Writing, Website Plans, Website Speed

How to Create a Writer Website: Writer SEO

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on May 30, 2023

No one will know about your awesome writer website if you don’t start to pay attention to writer SEO.

And without all the connections on your website you could be making, guess what happens? You miss will out on sales. And you may also miss out on places where you can appear and promote your book. Or libraries where you can have your book.

Note: this is an overview and not the details of any form of SEO, even writer SEO. That would take up a few hundred blog posts at least.

Why Does Writer SEO Matter?

Have you ever wondered how and why the results you get in a search are in the order they’re in? Yes, some of this has to do with paid advertising. But budgets are not infinite. Or, at least, they aren’t for most of us.

But SEO is, in a way, a form of free advertising. Optimizing for search means your post gets placed further up on search results. And that’s good. But is it good enough?

Page 1 or Die

Writer SEO - Sweet Brown saying, ain't nobody got time for that, illustrating the concept of writer SEO
Preach, Sweet Brown.

We live in a hurry-up, impatient, “ain’t nobody got time for that” world. And a good 90% or more of us never bother with the second page of search results!

So, while positive changes in position are nothing to sneeze at, they do not truly matter unless you’re on page 1 of results.

If that seems unfair, odd, and maybe even a reason why the human race is doomed, well, I’m with ya on that.

Yet our preferences do not matter.

Ads Are Outta Control!

But… there’s one problem with writer SEO or really any kind of SEO. We’re all gunning for page 1. And that means that the competition is fierce.

There’s you, me, and large corporations with insanely big budgets. There are people who’ve been doing SEO since before it had a name (or at least it feels that way).  So, how do you compete?

I Got an Itch for a Niche

Exxon is enormous! Their annual ad budget may very well be more than everything I have ever made in my life. And probably ever will.

But they’re not competing in the writing space. Even if their CEO decided to write a book, they would not be my competition. And they might not even really be my competition if their CEO decides to try their hand at writing something in the exact same genre as me.

Is James Patterson my competition? Well, not exactly. Yes, we are both writers. But that’s where the comparison stops. Now, Patterson does write science fiction. But are we really in direct competition? For one thing, a lot of his sci fi stuff is aimed at teens. Mine … is not.

So, maybe I don’t have to worry about him, or at least not too much. Same with JK Rowling and Stephen King, particularly as they don’t really write in my genre.

I’ve Got a Niche to Scratch

Amazon is great about having separate categories which match a ton of niches. Consider horror. Even if vampires, werewolves, wendigos, mummies, and serial killers were all in the same novel or film, so what? They all still have their own sub-niches (if you will) within horror.

Science fiction has a number of well-known niches:

  • Space opera – this is like Star Trek. My novel The Enigman Cave fits this niche, as it’s also following people on a spaceship.
  • Dystopian – this is like Ready Player One. My novels Mettle and Untrustworthy both fit this niche, even though they’re set in different places.
  • Science fiction noir – this is like Blade Runner or I, Robot, where cops and science fiction mix. My Obolonk and Time Addicts trilogies both fit. This is not a large genre and Amazon does not have it as a filter. But the good news is that there might not be a lot of competition…
  • Time travel – this is like the old TV show, The Time Tunnel. Time Addicts fits this niche.
  • Historical science fiction – now, this one’s tricky.

Issues with Historical Science Fiction

Science fiction isn’t normally set too far in the past. Even Stranger Things just goes back to the 1980s.

Without getting into Steampunk, one of the only examples I can think of are the films Time After Time (where HG Wells himself has to chase Jack the Ripper in the modern era) and Somewhere in Time (1970s playwright Richard Collier goes to the turn of the 20th century via hypnosis and falls in love with actress Elise McKenna).

In both stories, someone in the present is writing about the past. It makes sense that it would be a vehicle for a time travel story.

My Real Hub of the Universe trilogy fits this niche of a niche, which is so small that Amazon doesn’t list it as a genre (although at least GoodReads does!). And looking it up often means you find science fiction books written earlier in history, such as The Island of Dr. Moreau.

As a result, when you put that kind of work onto Amazon or the like, your tags and keywords had better be pitch-perfect and utterly on point.

Your Writer Website and Your Niche(s)

I’m not the only author who writes in more than one niche. In fact, many authors who do so will use a pen name or even several pen names.

So, for someone like me, writer SEO means looking at competition in all of these niches. And it means looking at the keywords which the more successful posts (the ones at the top of search, which don’t necessarily belong to bestselling authors) are using.

Keyword Research for Writer SEO

People who do SEO for a living are researching keywords pretty much all the time. It’s a fancy way of trying to determine what people are looking for. If you can give it to them, then you want them to be able to find you. The closer what’s on your website matches their search, the higher up (usually) your content will be in search engine results.

Google’s mission is to match seeker and website owner as closely as possible. Because if a person has a good experience with Google, they’re more likely to use Google than, say, Bing. As a result, Google can charge more for its advertising (and yes, unfortunately, paid ads are dominating the first page of search results. So page 2 can get some love after all—but never settle for anything lower).

Synonyms and Intent

To use an example a different form of art, consider film. Or cinema. AKA movies. Or pictures. AKA Hollywood or Bollywood or the Oscars or BAFTA awards, etc.

What is the difference in intent between these two searches:

  • movie for kids not Disney
  • classic cinema for children

Now, they both pull up lists of movies for the younger set. But the first is more likely to pull up articles about The Land Before Time, whereas the latter might pull up blog posts about The Red Balloon. Between the two searches, the first is more likely to pull up animation, too.

Now consider your books. I’ll use the Time Addicts trilogy as an example.

  • time travel with robots
  • science fiction noir in the far future

Both searches would fit this trilogy. The first gets a lot more hits. But the latter pulls up much more closely-related stuff. And if I change the first one to time travel with aliens (which would also fit Time Addicts), it gets me TV programs about ancient aliens.

What’s a better set of keyword phrases (kwps) to target? Probably some mix of these:

  • science fiction noir
  • sci fi noir
  • science fiction set in the far future
  • time travel noir (although currently there are two kinds of returns on this search which are coming up a lot)

Writer SEO, Searches, and Your Buyer Persona

Who’s your ideal reader? Your ideal customer? You have got to market directly to them. And you will need to write your blog and pages, etc. with that person in mind. If your ideal reader didn’t finish high school, then a term like movies is more likely to work than cinema. And if your ideal reader is female, you may want to toss in terms like feminism or strong female character.

If your ideal reader is a member of the LGBTQ+ community, then you will need to use terms which will apply—but I would caution you to be careful here. Terms evolve quickly. What was acceptable in 1999 is not necessarily going to fly in 2023. And for God’s sake, don’t try to reclaim a slur unless you would be a subject of said slur.

Writer SEO: Takeaways

Like I said above, this barely scratches the surface. Try tools like Keywordtool.io, answerthepublic.com, and MarketMuse (or Surfer SEO, Ubersuggest, or AhRefs) for more advanced ways to better target your ideal reader.

Want More of Writer Website Development?

If my post on website speed resonates with you, then be sure to check out my other articles about how to create a writer website.

Writer Website Development

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SEO and its DiscontentsSEO, SEO continued, Boston SEO Meetup, CLUMPS, discontents, WebTekPro

SEO and its Discontents

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on March 28, 2023

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Discontents and SEO?

A look at SEO and its Discontents

Now, I am no expert by any means. But these days, I understand it a hell of a lot better than I did back in the day.But I know it’s important and so I’m going to take my shot at trying to optimize things as best as I can. The fact that the site and this blog are already on Google (and I already pretty much own jespah as a keyword – I’m #2 on Google already) is encouraging.

An Early Hint

In 2010 I met Kevin Palmer for a networking meeting, and told him I was interested in creating a new site for myself. And he told me — it’s like three legs of a stool: Content, Design and SEO.

Content I’ve got. I’ve got content coming out of my ears. I’ve got stuff to write like, like Carter’s got Liver Pills as my Dad would say.

As for design, I use WordPress. It is far, far simpler to just use their templates. They have an excellent understanding of how to put together a sweet-looking website and give it some style. And it’s mine and I made it and I am not only fully responsible for the content, I am also responsible in every way for its design and usability. With the help of WordPress, it’s prettier and more usable than ever.

SEO

But then there’s SEO. My friend, Robert Gentel, who runs Able2know, which we both manage (he’s the owner, I’m the Community Manager/Project Manager/Chief Cook, etc.), had been an SEO whiz (although his methods are a bit out of date). I have talked to him about it a little bit.

As I spread my own wings, I also learn from classes at Quinnipiac and from looking at Google’s own tools and, frankly, from my own experimentation.

I’ll either fly or fall onto the pavement. The first option is more attractive, so SEO it is.

Discontents Can End—Just be Sure to Replace Them With Knowledge

Oh and the title? It’s a play on Freud’s book. I’m not a big Freudian but I do love the title.

Sometimes a title is only a title.

Pulling it Into the Present Time

As I have learned more and more about SEO, I have also found that, much like Plato, I feel like I know less and less. But for me, the easiest way to look at it is to look at Google and how it does SEO.

What I mean is, Google knows that Bing will eat its lunch if it does not give users a good experience. And so, its mission in life is to make sure that people are served up as search results the sites that they really want. And need.

If I search for bunny, then it’s my own damned fault if I get both rabbits and Playboy models.

But when I search for bunny chow, my intent is rather clear. I’m most likely to be either an owner or a prospective owner, or I work with rabbits in some manner. That could be anything from a veterinary clinic to a wildlife preserve.

The chances of me really wanting to know, say, Barbi Benton’s diet are virtually zero.

What Can a Search Engine Really Do?

Search engines can only know what we tell them. A blog about tractors is highly unlikely to have any information on bunny chow. And if it does, then the owner of that blog will have to make it abundantly clear that they’ve got a post or a page on food for rabbits.

Search engines do a lot of counting, weighing, and measuring. If your page on rabbit food only mentions the food one time, and otherwise blathers on and on about tractors, then search engines will rightfully assume that food for bunnies is not top of mind for you.

And if it’s not top of mind for you the writer, but it is for the searcher, then the searcher won’t see your page.

Or at least your page will be so buried that it’ll be as if it does not exist. This is a far better experience for the searcher. So if you want the searcher to come look at your bunny food page, then you had best rewrite your post to cover the topic a lot more closely.

Google is not a fan of either haphazard sites or haphazard blog posts and landing pages. Find a point and find a topic and stick with them. A lot of the rest is just details.

Is that everything for SEO? Of course not. But I think it’s a framework to start from.

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White Space is not your Enemy by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen, a Book ReviewBook Reviews, Killer UX Design, Content Nation by John Blossom, SEO Made Simple, Lee Odden, Dave Kerpen, Liana Evans, dummies, cluetrain manifesto, shama hyder kabadi, Numerati, Guerilla Marketing, White Space, Clay Shirky, Trust Agents, Kristina Halvorson, Stephen King, Zen, William Zinsser, Drupal for Dummies, Executive, XHTML, Communicating Design, Joshua Porter, Strategic Planning, Google Advertising Tools, Web Analytics, Right Hook, David Meerman Scott, web analytics, Revved Up, robot building, Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff, style guide, elements,

White Space is not your Enemy by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen, a Book Review

Published by Janet Gershen-Siegel on May 30, 2019

White Space is not your Enemy by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen

I read White Space is Not Your Enemy on my own, and then for class.

White Space is not your Enemy by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen is a beginning design book. And I purchased it because I definitely need assistance with design. While I (at least I think I do) have something of an understanding of which color goes with which, it is sometimes difficult for me to make something look good. Seeking some inexpensive professional help, I turned to this book.

Practical Help With Your White Space and More

So apart from the obvious title, the book offers tips on color combinations, font selection, focal points and even how to prepare a document for a professional print job. And the chapter on design sins really resonated with me.

I have seen poorly designed advertisements (both online and offline) and websites, and have never really been able to adequately articulate just why they were so hideous. So now I can.

Exercises

The exercises in the back of each chapter seemed, I thought, somewhat superfluous. However, I did find myself beginning to look at designs with a more critical eye.

For example, I noticed a print advertisement where the background photograph was of varied colors. Some were light, some, dark. The print, however, was pure white, and cut horizontally along the middle of the photograph.

Hence this would have been fine, except the copy crashed straight into a white space, so some of the print was invisible. Which part? The company’s name. Epic design fail.

Foolproof

Another extremely helpful chapter: the one on the “works every time” layout. This layout is all over the Internet and all over print media, and for good reason. It is, essentially, a full width photograph or other graphic across the top third of the screen or page, with the remaining two-thirds divided into two vertical columns for text.

A cutline (caption) goes directly underneath the visual (if appropriate; some visuals don’t need a cutline), with a more prominent headline directly below that.

Break up the columns into paragraphs and beware widows and orphans (one or two short words on a line). Place tags (these aren’t Internet meta tags), which are the logo, company name and small nugget of information such as the URL or physical address, in the lower right-hand corner. In addition, round it all out with generous margins all around. Voila! An instant beautiful (albeit somewhat common) layout!

If nothing else, that chapter has a greater value than the price of admission.

Learning Creativity

Creativity cannot, truly, be taught. But the peripherals around it can, such as how to gather ideas and nurture them, and how to place those ideas together in a coherent format. It’s like teaching pottery and smithing but not cookery: you get enough so that you can set the table, but not nourish anyone.

For that, you need to be an artist. And that, sadly, no book can ever teach you.

Rating for White Space is Not Your Enemy

5/5

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