One of the most important tools you can have in promoting yourself and your works is your personal website. Rather than simply depending on your publisher to have a page with your book on it, a bio, and maybe event information, maintaining a site for yourself allows you more control over the information that's available, as well as your interaction with people. (Dsiclaimer: keep in mind that this essay deals primarily with my tastes and experience in web design. I am not the ultimate authority, nor am I even a professional designer. YMMV.)
Getting Started: It may be tempting to just get a free site through Tripod or Geocities and leave it at that (or, gods forbid, a MySpace page as your sole link to the virtual world). However, http://www.weofferfreewebsites.com/KitchenPantry/1928573/yournamehere is a lot tougher to remember than http://www.(yourname).com. Additionally, http://yourname.weofferfreewebsites.com looks a lot less professional. And a lot of these hosts make up for the free hosting with pop up or banner ads, which add to the unprofessional look. First impressions are important, and it's worth the investment.
Some "free" website hosts may offer you the use of your own domain name-for a cost. That's fine, as long as they're consistent about their hosting. Talk to friends who have websites to find out who they recommend for hosting; you may be able to find local webhosting services, too, that offer a reasonable price for monthly hosting. You want to find a host that has a minimum of blackouts and downtime-it can be really frustrating to promote your site, only to have people unable to access it, and most folks won't go back for a second look. As for pricing, it varies. You should be able to find basic, dependable web hosting with a decent amount of bandwidth and storage for $20 or less a month (unless, of course, you own your own server, in which case you probably already know most of what I'm talking about in this essay).
Speaking of bandwidth and storage, ask your potential host what sorts of packages they have. Bandwidth regulates how many accesses to the site are allowed each month, while storage includes how many files you have on the host's server. If you've never had a website before, be sure to ask for a simple explanation of how many hits per month and how much stuff your website can have with each package. It's advisable to give yourself a little more credit than you might think-if you're not sure which of two packages would be best, get the one that has more bandwidth and storage, just in case you end up getting mad amounts of traffic. You can always downgrade later on (in most cases) if you find that you don't need that much, or you can keep it in anticipation of greater success later on.
Domain names: You'll also need to register a domain name. http://www.(yourname).com is generally a good choice. However, you're not limited to that. I originally chose thegreenwolf.com back when I was just looking for a name for my artwork business. It's nice because it's short, easy to remember, and I like it. Additionally, when I brought Taylor on board, I didn't have to change anything-much easier to share space that way. A couple of pointers-keep the domain name as short as possible, avoid unconventional spellings that may not be obvious when spoken aloud (ie, wytch instead of witch) and make sure that you don't resemble someone else's URL too much (ie, if someone else has lordeightball.com as a working site, you may want to avoid using lordeightball.net, especially if the other person is another author!).
If you don't use your name, try going for something that's at least somewhat evocative of what you write about. If you specialty happens to be training young familiars, you might choose kittenmagick.com or babyfamiliars.com. Also, while snazzy new endings for your URL (.biz, .tv, .us) are all the rage, try to get .com. It's the most common, and the easiest for people to remember. .net and .org are also common, but it's .com that's got the most buzz. Also, try to keep from using hyphens; when people hear "Lord Eightball Dot Com" spoken aloud, they're much more likely to type out lordeightball.com than lord-eightball.com if they don't have the URL written down in front of them.
Content: Your primary content should be informational. Write about your books and other writings, include links to anything that can be read online (book excerpts, articles, etc.), and write about yourself. Keep a schedule of events within easy reach so that people can find out where they can see you present and sign books, and include information for gathers or shops that might like to host you, to include your booking terms.
Try and limit yourself to one topic per page. It helps to keep things focused, especially if there's a lot of information there. Try to keep "extras" (like graphics, links, etc.) to a minimum. Include a link to the index on every page so that people who find, say, the page that talks about one of your books, can then easily get to the index and do some more exploring.
If you sell books on your site (rather than just telling people to head to a book store) you can make a little extra money in a couple of ways. One is through Amazon.com's Associates program, which gives you a tiny pittance if someone buys a book by clicking the specialized link on your site. However, I find it best to order the books wholesale from my publisher and then sell them through my site. Currently I use Paypal's shopping cart system, but this has several disadvantages, the most notable of which is that no matter how many copies of a book someone orders, it still charges the same amount of shipping for each one. One book may take $5.00 to ship priority with a padded envelope, but I know two books won't take $10 domestically. This means that I need to manually send a discount to the customer once I get the Paypal payment. However, most people are fine with it, and it's a lot more convenient than waiting for a check or money order to arrive. (Impulse shoppers of the world, unite!).
Blogs are a wonderful way of keeping in touch with people. I keep mine offsite at Livejournal, though I do have links to it on my site. Some people like keeping their blogs closer to home, though over time this does take up space. On the other hand, for some folks the blog is the main attraction of the site. Some blog hosts will let you direct your URL to your blog through them. Use your blog to keep readers abreast of developments, what you're currently working on, where you'll be presenting/signing, and even day to day stuff.
Web design: If you're having someone design your site for you, some of this will already be taken care of for you. However, read it over and show it to your designer, just in case.
Graphics are another area where investments count. Even if you have basic HTML skills, there's really only so much you can do with basic colored background and fonts. Additionally, a lot of the free backgrounds and clip art available…well…quite frankly….suck. Designers generally don't give away their good stuff, and there's no guarantee that what you're getting wasn't just snagged off of someone else's site somewhere without permission. Unfortunately people are often really hazy on internet copyright laws, and I've seen a lot of graphics stolen without permission. If it looks too good to be free, chances are it is. Of the decent artists who do offer free quality graphics packages, many of them limit the graphics only to noncommercial sites. Since your website is a place, in part, to sell your books, technically you're commercial.
A good graphic designer can put together a nice package for you. When I order graphics, what I ask for are: a good background image that I can tile like wallpaper on all the sites; a title graphic for the index page; a set of buttons to direct people to different sections of the page. I generally just use H1 titles for the subpages, though you can also order title graphics for those as well. So you might, for instance, have a background graphic, a title graphic, and buttons that include "My Books", "My Articles", "About Me", "News", etc. You can suggest colors and designs to be worked into the theme; I try to avoid things that have pretty much become cliché, like black, black and more black, pentacles (beware the golden shining pentacle!), stars and moons, clipart pixies, etc. Go for something classy and memorable; some people are very visually oriented and will remember your site more for the design than anything else-and come back because of it. Your artist should be able to put something together that's easy on the eyes (the busier the background, the harder it is to read the text).
You may be tempted to add more graphics yourself. Remember the golden spinning pentacle I mentioned earlier? I consider that a big no-no, along with huge, flashy, loud graphics that scream "I'M A WITCH!!!!", copyrighted images of fantasy wizards and scantily clad Indian princesses with wolves, and any sort of addition to your cursor that involves animation (faery wands with glitter, trails of stars, etc.) I'd also avoid anything that may make your page slower to load-large animations, applets and certain bits of Javascript, etc. Basically, the simpler the better. And for the love of all that is sacred, please don't embed music into your site. Not only can it slow down the loading time, but some people may actually leave the site in annoyance. Again, simpler = better.
And that leads us to organization. You want your index page, the first page that everyone sees, to be as concise as possible. I've seen countless numbers of pagan sites in general that can basically be summed up, from top to bottom, as:
--H1 Title in garish color (ie, yellow on black background, may be blinking), with the entire body of the site, text, pics and all, centered
--A huge, gaudy, often copyrighted and used without permission "magickal" picture (again, that whole wizard/witch/Indian Princess with Wolf thing) with the subtitle "Welcome to My Pagan Website!"
--H1 or H2 text in another garish color (baby blue on black or purple or orange comes to mind) going on for several paragraphs about what the site is about, and how wonderful pagans are, and how those evil Christians misunderstand us and if you don't like witches you need to just STFU!
--More headers for each section in H1 or H2 (blinking text optional), and text in varying shades unknown to nature (Bonus points if the text IS IN ALL CAPS)
--Random images grafted into the text, often for no apparent reason; usually the same species of "Look at me, I'm magickal!" pictures as are often found at the top.
--1,097,456,234 webring graphics, website awards, "click me!" pictures, banner ads and other random pictures all stuffed at the bottom of the site in a neverending parade of pixel hell-if this sounds familiar, and you've ever wondered why no one has ever signed your guestbook (which is stuck right between picture #'s 234,678 and 234,679), this is why.
--A golden spinning pentacle somewhere in there (because you just can't do tacky web design without it.) This particular memorable graphic is the Harvest Gold of web design. No matter how much you renovate your house (take down the wood laminate walls, replace the orange shag carpet with hardwood floors, replace the particle board kitchen cabinets with polished oak, put ceramic tile instead of peeling plastic in the bathroom, and get rid of the scary clowns painted on black velvet so you have room for the Rembrandt original), that Harvest Gold refrigerator will always give your home that 1970s vibe. The golden spinning pentacle is essentially the same thing in pagan web terms. Yeah, it was cool in its time (the mid 1990s) but just like that fugly fridge, there comes a time when the scrapyard is the best choice.
--The entire site usually takes at least 30 rotations of the wheel on top of my mouse to get through, and by the time I'm done I need a road map to get back to where I started.
Ideally, your index page should be an easy to navigate guide to your site. You can have links to the main sections of the site, but create a separate site map if you want to organize all the pages in one place (you can put a link to it at the bottom of every page using very small text). If you can make the index page take up two screens or less, even better. A splash page may seem like a good idea, but it's just one more annoying thing people have to click through. Make the first page that people see count for as much as possible without scaring visitors away.
For more tips on how not to do web design, check out Web Pages That Suck.
SEO: (This section brought to you in part by "Insider SEO & PPC" by Andreas Ramos and Stephanie Cota - see sources further down for more info on this excellent book.)
Search Engine Optimization has become a career in and of itself! Professional firms offer services to businesses and others who want their sites to be at the top of the search results. Here are a few tips that you can utilize to get good effects:
The Title Tag: In the HEAD section of each page, add (if it's not already there) this piece of HTML (use <> instead of () ):
(TITLE)(/TITLE)
Now, between those two chunks of HTML, write up a title for your website. This should include several keywords that describe your site (such as your name, the topics of your writing, etc.). So, for instance:
(TITLE)Lord Eightball, Author of Magical and Pagan Books(/TITLE)
Try and keep your title to fifty characters and spaces or less. This will keep it from getting cut off my some search engines. I've made a unique title tag for each page on my site, with each one being specific to the content of the page, rather than just using the same one over and over for the entire site.
Meta-stuff: The meta-description is what shows up as the description of a page on a search result. If there's no meta-description, the search just picks up the first few words on the page. Using meta-descriptions lets you customize the description people will see when they search up your site, plus it's a good way to add in relevant keywords. So Lord Eightball could use (again substitute <> instead of () when you actually go to use this):
(meta name="Description" content="Writings and texts on magick, alchemy, dowsing, numerology and mohair sweaters")
Again, give each individual page its own meta-description. The search engine may pick up additional text from further down your page, but at least this way you can put crucial keywords at the top.
Meta-keywords, on the other hand, have pretty much fallen out of favor since most search engines ignore them. The HTML for meta-keywords looks something like this:
(meta name="keyword" content="magic magick pagan occult Lord Eightball books author")
Since spammers and other unsavory characters have abused this piece of meta-stuff, most search engines these days are designed to pass over the keywords. The same goes for the (NOSCRIPT) and (NOFRAMES) tags; if you try to sneak words in there they'll be ignored. You may as well save yourself some time and not worry about these.
File names: Another way to sneak a keyword in is through your file name. While I don't use this as much as some other SEO techniques, there's nothing wrong with it. For instance, Lord Eightball could name the file that contains information on "The Magick of Mohair", his newest book, magickofmohair.html.
H1 Headers and Other Text-Related Things: Okay. I admit I hate H1 headers. They're ugly as hell, and boring. If I had the money (or the talent in graphics) I'd just have a text title for every individual page. However, a number of search engines (Google in particular) tend to look for H1 headers for descriptive content. You can use CSS to tweak the header to make it prettier, but avoid using SPAN or DIV, which will make the header read as body text instead.
Also, don't make your page entirely out of images (i.e., wall to wall .jpg files that have text in the design but aren't actual text themselves). This gives search engines nothing but the image file names to go on.
Finally, don't hide your keywords by typing them at the very top of the site in the same color as the background so they blend in (but are still seen by web spiders). That can get your site removed from certain search engines entirely.
Other Forms of Promotion: The first thing you'll want to do is get your site into as many search engines as possible. Now, this is a DIY (do it yourself) article, so if you're paying a professional firm to do your promo work for you, this is already being taken care of for you.
Most of the bigger search engines will eventually find your site when one of their spiders crawls across it and picks up the info. However, you can help the process along by submitting it to those that still have manual submission forms. There are also some pagan-specific search engines (I usually just Google "pagan search engine" every so often since they seem to pop up and disappear like mushrooms).
Link exchanges are another good choice. If you run across a pagan website that has a collection of links, email the webmaster/mistress and request a link exchange-you may even put their link up on your links page (this should NOT be your index page, by the way) as a gesture of good faith. Some sites also have free add-a-link sites, though the links may still need to be approved by the site owner. Make sure that the site in question has been updated recently; otherwise you may just be wasting your time. Also, try and keep it on-topic-trying to exchange links with, say, a site aimed at fly fishing probably won't go over well (unless it's a pagan fly fishing club or something like that).
If you have a blog or other networking site, make sure a prominent link to your main website can be found there. For example, I have accounts at Livejournal, MySpace and Tribe and I have links to my website in my profile at all three. I also use all three blogs to announce updates to the site and other special information. (Please check out (spammer link) for tips on how to avoid being a spammer in your online promotion efforts).
If you have business cards (these are an excellent idea) make sure your website is on there; the same goes for any promotional material, and even your books themselves. Some pagan and occult book stores allow local people to leave relevant business cards and flyers at the shop for customers to pick up, so see if you can add some of your own there. VIstaprint offers 250 free business cards as a trial offer, but they're good as general printers and creators of promotional material.
A Couple More Extras: A guestbook has been one of the most popular website accessories. It lets visitors leave their mark (and any compliments or suggestions) and it gives you an idea of what sort of traffic you're getting. Do be careful, though-guestbooks may be targeted by spammers, who will leave blatant ads for everything from stocks to Viagra in their entry. I suggest setting your guestbook to moderated status so that you can approve or deny entries before they're left.
Hit counters are a must-have. Be sure to get one (such as through Bravenet that allows you to track referring links and see how many unique visitors you had on any given day.
You probably don't need your very own forum. However, an announcement-only listserve is a great idea. Yahoo Groups offers free listserves, and you can get HTML once you've signed up that, pasted on your website, will allow visitors to instantly subscribe to your listserve.
Updating: I once corresponded with the webmaster of a very successful pagan website about how to keep people coming back. One of the tips he gave me was to update frequently so that people would have reasons to return. A purely informational site (e.g., Wicca 101 tips, etc.) can get away with not being updated for years; chances are the information will still be good. However, since this site is about you and what you're up to, you want to make sure people know that you've been doing stuff since 2004. The more recently your site has been updated, the more likely it is people will continue to poke around, especially if you have a page with recent updates listed so returning visitors can check out what's changed since they last came by. Don't go in and just change the "last updated" date every day, though-it's dishonest, and people do notice, especially if nothing remarkable has changed in the past 6 months. You don't have to log every single HTML correction you make, but if you're tweaking the site anyway, change the date so people know you're still paying attention. I generally make it the last thing I do before shutting down the FTP program.
Conclusion: Hopefully this has given you some material to help you get started on your web presence. It's not the do-all and end-all of websites, but these are things I've found quite useful over the years. Good luck!
Sources:
Web Design On Daven's Journal
The Most Irritating Web Design Elements Poll
Ramos, Andreas and Stephanie Cota (2006). Insider SEO & PPC: How To Get Your Website to the Top of the Search Engines. Jain Publishing.
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