Sillybean

Improving IndieBound

Earlier this week there was a post on The Written Nerd about IndieBound (formerly BookSense), inviting booksellers and bloggers to share ideas on how it could better serve independent bookstores. I’m writing to the marketing person, but I…

Paged Media: web design for authors

The web design for authors posts I’ve been doing have evolved into an actual business. Paged Media is a web design company devoted to authors.

You know me; the designs will be standards-compliant, CSS-based, accessible, and…

Authors discussing web design

Good discussion of what should go on an author’s site over at LiveJournal. Of course, yours truly had to weigh in, but other people had interesting things to say too.

My original comment exceeded LJ’s character limit.…

Server log analysis

I’m swamped with work, and in my free time I’ve been writing madly. And I’m getting back to that in just a second, but I wrote this up quickly as a reply to someone and then realized that it was…

Things that make you look like an amateur on the web, part 3: just plain stupid

• Misspellings. I know of at least one NYT bestseller whose name is misspelled in her page title. There’s no copyeditor between you and your web audience. And search engines won’t recognize you if there’s a typo in your

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Things that make you look like an amateur on the web, part 2: special effects

• Mouse droppings. As annoying as pop-up ads — and the only way to get rid of them is to leave the site.
• Mystery meat navigation. Your visitors should never have to guess where to click.
• Transition effects.
• Java plugins

…

Things that make you look like an amateur on the web, part 1: images

(I realize lists of things you shouldn’t do are less helpful than tips on what you should do, but let’s get the basics out of the way first. I’ll get back to the proactive stuff in a bit.)

• Backgrounds,

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Jonathan Strahan on author’s sites

Seems I’m not the only one with something to say…

Provide information people expect. If you are an author and you are putting up a web page add a “News” section. In a fit of foolhardiness, actually call

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Website Content: The Book List

Or, How Not to List Your Books in Such a Way as to Make Your Readers Rend Their Garments in Despair.

Another common question from the RWA talk: “What content should the site have?” Or, put another way, “What…

Contests and freebie sluts

A quickie while I get back up to speed: why contests are not effective promotional tools for authors.

What to look for in a professional web designer

• Knowledge of web standards.
• A good, recent portfolio. Make sure that at least one site was done within the last calendar year.
• Someone you arenââ
  
  Posted on February 10 2005, 9:15 pm in Web Design, for Authors · 2 comments

On hiring designers, FrontPage, and your 12-year-old nephew

[For those coming in from Ma.gnolia, it might be helpful to know, until I get my category tags fixed, that this is part of my web design for authors series.]

The choice between designing a site yourself or hiring…

Why web standards matter

In my cost overview I nattered on about Dreamweaver’s standards compliance and Frontpage’s lack thereof. There are a number of reasons this is important, and The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards summarizes them nicely.

Jeffrey…

Belated intro

What qualifies me to tell you anything about the web

Hosting and domains

As I mentioned yesterday, you should pay no more than $10/month to host a typical, modestly successful site. Start with a basic package; you can always upgrade if you need more disk space than you anticipated or your site…