How to Design Your Website

Instead of talking about the technical side of building your website, I'll talk about the way in which you should approach such endeavor. You could easily find sites that provide with with graphics, html editor, domain registration and website servers. The difficult part comes when you don't know what it is your site will need to include in order to function and serve your visitors properly.

As an author, your goal should be to connect to your audience. If you didn't think about how you were going to promote your book before you wrote it, this is the time. I wrote something about this here.

It's possible to create a whole community around your book. Take a look at these websites in which the authors have done just that, and that's their platforms to market their books. Jim Canterucci and Niambi has done an excellent job at this. Not only building this community site provides you with the opportunity to market your books, it opens doors to do workshops, presentations and add more merchandise related to your book.

Something I haven't come across a lot is a good sites for fiction books, if you have seen some please let me know. So far I've been following Eragon since Christopher did such a good job at marketing his self-published book that his book got noticed by the big guys. A movie will be release this year and the second book on the trilogy, Eldest, has been released as well. He has a good site you can use as reference for a fiction book site.

So there you go for now, go over the sites and search some of your favorite authors to get ideas on how they promote their books. Then take a look at your site and see how you can improve it, I'm telling you, I'm doing the same thing. Tell me about your site and what has worked and not. What would you like to change? or just plain show off your site by giving us a link to take a look of it.

Have an awesome weekend right after you finish your work today.