- Formerly known as "Writers Manual" -

The Writer Gazette welcomes you!
Look to us for all your writing resource needs!

Create a Personal Website
by Kelly Bembry Midura

A personal website is a great way to showcase the talents of any writer, especially freelancers. Emailed queries to publications are vastly simplified: no need to attach resumés or writing samples, simply refer to a web page where they may be viewed at any time. Most editors love it.

Let’s say that you want to create a simple website that will contain a brief biography, a resumé, and several samples of your published work. It is not as big an undertaking as you might think. Writers’ websites are about text: writing, editing and displaying it in a clear, easy-to-read fashion. The primary visible difference between printed and of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) documents are hyperlinks, tiny snippets of code that transport the viewer from one place to another when clicked. No other bells or whistles are required (unless you want them, of course.)

It is this simplicity that makes writers’ websites among the affordable to develop. You may even choose to design your own website. Whether you design your website yourself or with the help of a professional, these are the necessary steps toward building your home in cyberspace.

Choose a web host.

A website is a folder located on computer that is equipped to "serve" information to the Internet (ergo the term "server"). This folder contains HTML documents, graphics, and any other materials that are used on your site. You can either rent that space from a hosting company for as little as $10 per month or you can use free space if you are willing to put up with advertising on your pages.

Geocities (http://geocities.yahoo.com/) is one of the most popular free web hosts, offering 15 MB of storage space, more than enough for most writers’ websites, along with lots of free goodies such as guest-books. Advertising is displayed in a compact square on the side of your website’s pages. But you get what you pay for: while Geocities is very easy to use, the online help is iffy and the technical support is virtually nonexistent.

Tripod (www.tripod.lycos.com) is another popular free web host, offering pretty much the same services as Geocities. Tripod, however, is a better choice for the hands-on type who foresees spending a lot of time refining their website, offering extensive help archives, free scripts (the mini-programs that enable interactivity), and excellent "Webmonkey" tutorials (http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/). Ads are displayed either as very persistent pop-up windows or as banners on every page of your website.

To browse dozens of free web hosts try About.com’s guide (http://freebies.about.com/shopping/freebies/cs/homepages/). One of the best aspects of free web hosting is that you have not signed a contract, so you can switch hosts whenever you feel like it. Try one, and if you are not satisfied, try another!

If you use a free web host, your site’s URL, or address, will be a subdirectory of the host, unless you register a domain (see below). For example, a Geocities site's URL will be www.geocities.com/yourname. To find a paid web host try browsing the reviews atTopHosts (www.tophosts.com). A writer’s website will probably not require very much web space, and should cost about $10 per month to host.

Register a domain.

In order to use a paid web host you must register a domain. The actual location of your website is a bunch of numbers. A domain is simply a forwarding address that is easier to remember. If you move your website to a new host, the domain can be directed to forward viewers to the new location.

Whether or not you choose to register a domain depends both on how easily you want people to be able to find your site, and how easily you want to be able to move your site in the future. If you switch between free web hosts without using a domain, for example, your website’s address will change. Domains are being snapped up quickly. When in doubt, go ahead and register it through a registrar such as Network Solutions (www.networksolutions.com) or Tucows (www.tucows.com). Many web hosting companies will offer to handle domain registration for you when you open an account. While registering a domain is not difficult, I recommend that you take that route if you are registering a domain for the first time.

Choose your tools.

You have three options for creating your website. If you have chosen a free web host, you can use the "page wizard" that is included with your hosting account. The advantage to these wizards is that they are meant for amateurs. They are WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) programs consisting of templates upon which you paste text or images. You never have to learn a lick of HTML to make them work. The disadvantage is that you must work online, which can be slow and expensive if you pay per-minute for Internet access. However, if you just want to produce a site quickly and are not too particular about the colors and design, these wizards are a great way to do just that.

If you use a paid web host, you have to design the website offline using web authoring software, then upload it to your web space. There are many programs to suit every level of experience. If you are familiar with Microsoft Word, and want to design a professional-looking site, it may be worth your while to invest in Microsoft Front Page, a WYSIWYG program with a familiar Microsoft interface. Front Page ships with dozens of "themes," which superimpose an integrated look on an entire site, complete with fonts, buttons, page headings, etc. This is fast and easy; however it does guarantee that there will be other websites out there that look almost exactly like yours. Front Page costs anywhere from $90 to $140 depending on rebates. A 45-day trial can be downloaded from the Microsoft website (http://www.microsoft.com/frontpage/).

There are other, less expensive WYSIWYG programs out there. Some are even downloadable "freeware" or "shareware," such as the highly rated Hot Dog Page Wiz. For product reviews and downloads try ZDNet’s extensive archives (www.zdnet.com).

Another option is to hire professional website designer. You may want to use a free web design program to create a "rough draft" of your site beforehand, employing the designer to polish it up. Or you may use the tips I have mentioned to help create a hand-drawn sketch of the site’s layout and prepare your written material for the web. Surf the Net to find related websites that you like and show them to your designer, pointing out the aspects that you would like to see on your site. Website designers are visual people: anything that you can do to demonstrate exactly what your goals are for your website will be appreciated, and will ultimately save their time, and your money.

Design your website.

When developing your website, either on your own, or with a website designer, try to look at it as your intended viewers will. If you anticipate that your audience will be primarily editors, introduce yourself on the first page of the site with a very brief summary of your professional experience. This page should be short and quick to load—editors are notoriously impatient! Avoid patterned backgrounds, photographs, or anything else that will slow the page’s download time. Writing samples and other professional qualifications should be easy to find. A simple navigation bar listing "resumé," "published work," "biography," and any other topics will do the trick.

While it is always tempting to experiment with gadgets, it’s better to leave those to the professionals. Multimedia effects must be done well, or not at all. A website that is loaded with awkward, slow-loading, or unnecessary features won’t do anything to enhance your professional reputation. As a rule, nothing should blink, flash, move around, or otherwise distract from your written work. If the graphics aren’t top-quality, don’t use them at all. If you want to include "fun" or personal things on the site, such as photos, that’s OK, but keep them relatively unobtrusive.

Upload the site.

The site’s finished and ready to show to the world. Now it’s time to upload it to the server. It sounds scary, but in fact all you are doing is moving files from a folder on your computer to a folder on the host’s computer. This is accomplished through File Transfer Protocol (FTP.) If you have ever uploaded photos to a photo developing site or sent files to a storage service such as FreeDrive, you have used FTP. The free web hosts make this very easy with a graphical "file manager." These utilities are a bit slow and usually upload no more than five files at a time. If you anticipate making a lot of changes to your site, you may want to download a trial copy of WS-FTP (www.wsftp.com) or Cute FTP (www.cuteftp.com) for more options and speed.

Promote the site.

It’s always exciting when a website goes "live." But does anyone else know about it? Search engines and directories do not actually know about your website unless you tell them. This is called "promotion." You may wish to pay a professional website developer to submit your site to directories simply because they will already know how to get your site listed in the best possible way. However, anyone can submit sites to search engines and directories. The fastest way to get the word out is to use a web-based submission service such as SelfPromotion (www.selfpromotion.com) or Jim Tools (www.jimtools.com/). If you choose to promote your site yourself it will definitely be worth your time to learn a thing or about meta tags, the invisible bits of code that tell search engines about your site. To learn more about getting the word out about your site, try Spider Food (www.spider-food.net) for plain-English tutorials on meta tags and website promotion.

Finally, tell everyone about your site! Add it to your email "signature." Mention it on message boards and newsgroups. As long as this is done sparingly and tastefully it is not considered "spamming." Consider joining a web ring at www.webring.com. Develop a links page and ask everyone that you list on it to link back to you as well. If your site contains information on a specific subject, ask related sites to link to it. I live in Prague, the Czech Republic, and I successfully asked several expatriate websites to link to my personal journal describing my life here, for example. It’s amazing what a simple, polite note to a webmaster will do, even in this digital age.

Finally, you can offer to contribute an article to a related website in exchange for a link back to your own site, just like I did with this article. Barter works! (:

Copyright 2001 Kelly B. Midura

Kelly Bembry Midura is a writer and website designer specializing in websites for creative freelance professionals. She invites readers to visit her at Kelly’s Web Studio (http://www.kellyswebstudio.com), to browse more useful links for writers and website designers.

Free Clip Art:

http://webclipart.about.com/internet/webclipart/

The About.com guide to web clip art. Search by topic to find the perfect image.

http://www.clipart.co.uk/

Clip Art Warehouse. A huge collection of useful icons, animated widgets, etc. Varying quality.

http://www.elated.com/

British design firm offers high-quality free clip art of all kinds, plus web page templates.

http://www.angelswebgraphics.com

Angel’s Web Graphics. An especially nice selection of free backgrounds, buttons and borders.