Anatomy of a Writer’s Website
My article “The Anatomy of a Writer’s Website” is now available on WritersDigest.com. I spoke with writers, web designers, and other experts to give you the scoop on how to create your own website or hire a designer to do it for you. I hope you enjoy it! [lf]
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Oct 10, 2008 Writing
I saw this in the magazine and will be referring back to it again I’m sure – it was a great and very thorough and informative (and entertaining) read. In fact, I’m off to recommend it to some journos now! x
Thank you so much for posting this, Linda! I actually read this article in the print publication and was looking for it the other day. Yes, I need to organize – I can’t find anything lately! I’ll be working on sprucing up my blog this weekend and can really use this information!
Well done, Linda! It gave me some pointers (really interesting one from Reese Spykerman about putting a few text-only clips on your site rather than always linking to your stories on external sites) and a great reminder to freshen up my site.
Elaine
Yes, I saw this article in the printed version of Writer’s Digest when it first came out. I highly recommend it. It motivated me to finally pull together a website. Click on the results above! Thanks, Linda.
Thanks, guys! I’m glad you found the article helpful.
To ensure your readers use best practices, I’m going to further recommend that the use of text versions of your clips should only be done when you retain copyright and reprint privileges.
My favorite strategy these days regarding clips is this:
-have a brief ‘blurb’ about each clip, with a link to read more
-then, have some of the clips as PDF files, and others as text (html) files. For the ones that are text/html files, have that link go to a separate page on your site so it has its own unique url.
Here’s a recent writer’s site we completed-your readers might find the clip set up interesting and helpful as they embark on working on their own sites:
http://www.susanbrackney.com
I prefer the method of having the ‘read more’ go to its own page now, rather than a pop up window (as I set up for Linda Formichelli’s site long ago) as this feeds more content into the search engines and lets you add important keywords to the page itself (useful if you’re looking to categorize yourself as a specific type of writer–e.g. travel journalism, or real estate writing, etc)
This couldn’t be more timely for me! I was just commenting to someone the other day about how my site is utterly craptastic and I really need to do something about it. Thanks for the resource.