Designing this website

My heart sank when I read the email: 'I'm retiring.'

Truth be told, I had been expecting to read these words from Colin, my website designer, one day.  Just not that day.  I had been working with Colin for fifteen years very successfully, but now I would have to find someone else to design my website, or do it myself.

I consulted my daughter – who knows about these things – but who also unfortunately has a proper job and so can't be exploited at slave-labour rates to do it all for me.  She told me how the world of websites had changed and I should do the job myself.

I was probably one of the first authors in the UK to have my own website, which I did indeed design myself.  My second novel, Trading Reality, was published in 1996.  It was about a virtual reality company and the publicist of my US publisher insisted that if I was writing a book on such a high-tech subject I needed my own website.  So I built one on Compuserve using one of their templates.

Soon, every author had a website and we were all paying designers to design them.  Over the years, as new books were published, the content on my website grew and grew, ably marshalled by Colin, my designer.  We were proud of the website, there was a lot of good stuff on there for fans to read, but every time I wanted to make a small change I had to contact Colin, who made the changes which I then checked.  Outrageously, he then would send me a bill for his time.  

According to my daughter, who knows about these things, websites have been changing.  Less text.  Sleeker design.  More flexible sites that can be read equally well on big-screen computers and tiny phones.  My site was great for a committed fan who had half an hour to find out all about me and their favourite books.  But not necessarily for someone who wanted to see who I was and what I wrote in less than a minute.

There are four services which you can use to design your own website: Wix, Weebly, Wordpress and Squarespace.  My daughter suggested Squarespace.  She had also looked at a number of crime writers' websites and suggested a couple that she thought looked good in the 2020s.  One of these was Chris Lloyd's: chrislloydauthor.com (he writes really good books about a detective in Paris during the war).  I noticed that this site had been designed using Squarespace by Charlotte Duckworth.  I had heard of Charlotte as an author, but didn't realise that she designed sites for other authors on the side.

Not only does she design them, but she has put together a really good course on how to design your own.  I took the course – money well spent – and was ready to have a go.

Here are some of the main points I learned from Charlotte's course.  Get your material ready before you start.  Set aside a week to do the bulk of the work.  Less text, not more.  Don't use one of the  Squarespace templates because you will lock yourself in. And, most importantly, enjoy it.  It can be fun as long as you don't treat the task as an admin chore.

And it was!  Mostly, I followed her advice.  I have published 23 books and organising the site so that any one of these can be quickly found was a challenge. There isn't much text.  But I have 25 years of content that I thought some people who enjoy my books might actually want to read.  So I set up a fifth page, called "Backstories", which breaks all the rules and has links to lots of content. 

During my researches, I came upon one widely-held piece of advice, with which I profoundly disagree, but which I think explains a lot about the misery of dealing with websites today.  This was that you should work out what you want the users of your website to do and everywhere guide them to do it.  In my case, I want readers to download a free novella and sign up to my mailing list.  Yet I believe that a website should anticipate what users want to do and help them do it.  This will probably be something entirely different from what I want them to do. 

This explains why websites can be so frustrating to use today.  For example, pop-ups are good from the website owner's point of view because they prompt a small number of users to do what you want, but very frustrating from most ordinary users' point of view.  There are no pop-ups on my site.

Interestingly, this is a battle which was fought in the eighties and nineties outside the online world and the winners were those companies who made things easy for the customer.  I hope that will happen online one day too.    
You can tell that my new website isn't professionally designed, despite the input from Colin and my daughter who knows about these things.  Like everything else, professional designers are much better than amateurs in ways that amateurs can't even appreciate.  But the site does the job and, as I publish more books and launch my new series, I will be able to change it myself.

Oh, and one final tip if you are planning to design your own website.  Get yourself a daughter who knows about these things.