Archetype Writing Blog

On Monday we talked about the importance of having a website for your book/s.  Today we're going to talk about how to get that website built.

Storyboarding

The first thing you need to do is sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and storyboard a bit.  What is your primary graphical symbol going to be? What do you want your menus to say?  Will you have submenus?  How will you lay them out?

To the right you'll see what a basic storyboard looks like for me...and how that might translate into a completed site.  My sites rarely look just like my storyboards, but they're often quite similar.

Once I've come up with a basic storyboard, I do a lot of thinking in Photoshop and Dreamweaver.  I try combining things in different ways to see how they look.  I went through nearly 15 iterations of the Writer's Guide to Psychology website before I was happy with the design.  To the right and below are just three of them (the bottom one being what I settled on).


In other words, don't worry if it takes you a while to get it right.  Trial and error is often the best way to figure out what's going to work for you and your book.

Actually Building the Site

I'm one of the lucky ones -- I've been creating webpages since 1995, and I love doing it. It's fun for me to design a site; create the graphics, text, and other media; and tweak until I'm happy.

You may not feel that way, or you may not yet know how to build a website on your own.  If either of these things is the case, you have several options.

1. Hire someone to build the site for you.

• Pros: You don't have to get your hands dirty.  You pay someone and the work is done.
• Cons: You're trusting your site to someone else, and you don't get the same opportunity to play around until the site feels just right.  Having someone else build a site for you an also be expensive, especially if you rely on them to do all your updates.

2. Use a website that provides templates.

• Pros: You can build a site on your own without having to understand how the coding works.
• Cons: These template sites vary widely in quality, ease of use, and functionality. Many (if not most) of them scream amateur. Some require you to have some basic knowledge of how the web works.  Some are costly.  You are limited by the template you choose, especially if you're plunking down hard-earned cash to use a particular one. And there's no guarantee someone else won't be using exactly the same template.

Your Domain Name

If you're not using Blogger or WordPress (or sometimes even if you are), you'll want a website address (aka a domain name) that refers to you or your product.  Fortunately, domain names are inexpensive, often around $10 a year.  GoDaddy.com is an easy place to buy a domain name, though I prefer SSL Catacomb Networking, as they're often cheaper and I like the control they give me over my domain names.

Dot-com (.com) names are the most popular because everyone automatically tacks ".com" onto a website address, but you can use all kinds of domain extensions (.net, .info, etc.) if .com is already taken.  Though website domain sellers often encourage you to buy every extension under the sun, that's really not necessary.

Once you have your domain name and host service, you're ready to upload your finished site. (I use Website Source because you can do pretty much everything with it...including shell in if you want to. Don't worry if you don't know what shelling in is...it's the ability to do high-level customization of your site on the server side.)  Programs like Dreamweaver and Expression Web will help you upload straight from the program.

So...if you have a website, what approach are you using?  Do you like it?  Would you do anything differently if you were starting over?

A PS on websites: I was going to do a major overhaul of the Archetype site, paring it down quite a bit, but in the end I decided it was best to let the site stand mostly as-is, unwieldy though it may be. After all, my goal in writing the book has been to add to the information available to writers on accurate psychology, so it seems almost counterproductive to be reducing the information already available online.