A Better Way Of Managing Your Author Website

From homicidal urges to gratitude — what a difference a month or two can make.

Awhile back, this blog was hacked, defaced, and generally uglifed. My fault, most likely. I hadn’t updated the foundational software, WordPress, since I’d first installed it a year-and-a-half ago. This was just begging for trouble. There was probably a security vulnerability that’s since been patched.

During the rebuilding process, I got a lot more familiar with WordPress, both on the surface and under the hood, until I finally had to ask myself the obvious: “Why why WHY am I not using this for my author website, too?”

I am now. Although it’s still a work in progress — websites are always a work in progress — my old website went poof yesterday and the totally overhauled version went live.

So while being hacked was a huge inconvenience at the time, now words cannot express the full measure of my appreciation to the hacker. I even feel kinda bad for calling him a “gnat from a third-world pesthole.” Without his meddling, it would never have occurred to me to tackle this new project.

For free, and doing it myself, I now have a website that I’m happier with in every way than the site I hired a designer to do several years ago.

Let’s see if we can spare you the need for vandalism to reach the same conclusion. And, if you do, how to get started.

The Problem With The Traditional Website

If you’re a whiz with HTML coding and site-building tools like Adobe Dreamweaver, you may wonder what the big deal is. I, however, am not. It’s an expertise that eludes many writers.

Dreamweaver is what gave birth to my site’s original form, and once I took over its management, I always found it such a pain in the ass to update that a lot of the time I just didn’t bother. And when I did, I still dreaded it.

Even when using something as relatively user-friendly as Adobe Contribute, it was still like tipping a chain of dominos: Add one new thing to the main page usually meant having to rejigger everything, sizing and scaling it just right so there were no weird gaps, making sure everything was balanced, and so on.

There were so many things I could’ve put up but didn’t, because it seemed there was no good way to make them fit. Or it didn’t seem worth the trouble because I knew I’d have to take it down to make room for something else in a week or two.

For the past year-and-a-half, a better way was staring me right in the face.

Enter WordPress

WordPress may be the world’s most prevalent blogging software, but it’s also used as the foundation for countless websites, and for the same reasons:

• It’s free.
• But it’s actually worth paying for.
• It’s easy to work with, even if you have zero experience with web coding. (Although some coding understanding definitely comes in handy.)
• It’s almost infinitely configurable and customizable, in part because of the vast selection of plug-ins and widgets. (All that stuff along the right side of this page? Widgets.)
• It’s media-friendly, and makes simple work of embedding video and audio.
• It’s open-source, with thousands of users actively contributing to expand its capabilities.
• Whatever you want to do in it, chances are that someone already has, and has written a how-to tutorial, or filmed one for YouTube, that will turn up via Google.

I won’t lie. Rebuilding my site was a time-consuming project that took up a lot of October and the earlier part of November. But the time savings and simplicity will carry forward indefinitely. I can now put something up in a few minutes, with no fuss, and the site meets me halfway in rearranging itself.

Plus a lot of what I learned, and refined, in the process will filter back to this site.

Wins all around.

The Main Things You’ll Need To Build Or Redo Your Own Site

Some are essentials, others optional:

(1) Web space and your own domain name. True for any website, obviously. If you don’t have them already, hosting providers such as GoDaddy and HostICan are good one-stop-shopping solutions.

(2) WordPress software. Many web hosts provide an installation option somewhere in their control panels or site management dashboards. For manual installation anywhere you want, it’s also available for download at WordPress.org. (WordPress.com, on the other hand, is for blogs hosted directly by WordPress.)

(3) A theme. The skin that determines what your WordPress site looks like, and maybe some of its functions and features. Some themes are design-intensive straight out of the can; others more minimalist but highly configurable. Themes come in free and premium (i.e., paid) flavors. WordPress installs with two built-in themes, and there must be thousands more available. Start your search under Appearance, in the WordPress dashboard’s left-side menu.

(4) A photo/graphics editor. For tweaking, resizing, and web-optimizing images for quicker load times. Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are the champs here.

(5) FTP software. Behind what you see at any web site lurks something called an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) site, which stores all the image, media, and web code files. Its web address usually just replaces “http” with “ftp.” Sometimes you need to get at these files and folders. Although WordPress makes it easy to upload and manage graphics and multimedia, and hosts often provide browser-based FTP access in your account dashboard, sometimes the best way is to go as direct as possible. I like a program called Fetch, but there are lots of choices here.

(6) A design-savvy friend. If you have a friend fitting this description, might as well call in a favor, for anything from oversight to material contributions. While I worked up my new site’s header image myself, it’s obviously based on the header for this site, which was created by a designer friend. I never could’ve come up with that from scratch.

(7) A plan. Have a clear, organized idea of the visual image you want to convey and the content you want to include. And, if you’re revamping an existing web site, what you want to jettison. So … brainstorm. Take notes. Make sketches. Furiously wad paper up and start over. Bottom line, know what you want to build before you break out the Legos. Yes, it will evolve during the process. But have a starting place in mind. Stumped? Visit other writers’ web sites and see what they’ve done. Steal ideas and adapt them.

(8) Patience. Because mistakes will be made.

3 Ways To Get Your Feet Wet With WordPress

Even software that’s as easy to use as WordPress can still be intimidating when you first start using it. Everything has a learning curve, and most of us prefer to learn something when there’s no pressure, and without putting experiments and goofs on public display.

Here, then, are three ways to explore and tinker with WordPress in private:

(1) Set up a sandbox site. “Sandbox” is a developers’ term that denotes something with limited access. In this case, you can also consider it a place to play. Just sign up for a free account at WordPress.com, and you’ll get a fresh installation. Explore the menu, poke around, see what does what. You can’t hurt anything.

(2) Block your work from public view. Say you’ve installed WordPress on your own site. Among its jillions of available plug-ins, one of the handiest is Maintenance Mode. When activated and enabled, it tells visitors that your site is closed for maintenance. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, you can still see everything you’re doing.

(3) Install WordPress on your own computer. The ultimate in privacy and convenience. It’s the route I took while building my new site, doing everything on my own hard drive until I was satisfied that it was ready to move online. It’s a little more involved, but not much, and worth the effort.

In a nutshell, this means tricking your computer into thinking it’s a web server. Some of the time, anyway. Mac users merely need to install a free software package called MAMP (acronym for Mac + Apache + MySQL + PHP … the latter three are programs commonly used to run servers and dynamic websites). Windows equivalents to MAMP are collectively known as WAMP; two popular options are WampServer and XAMPP. Once installed, these will enable you to run WordPress at home, the same as if it were out in the wild.

A further beauty of this option is that, after you’ve migrated your site online, you still have a safe environment to test future refinements — design changes, new plug-ins and widgets, updates, etc. — and see how well you like them, or if they create any conflicts, before going live.

Resources

A comprehensive how-to tutorial is beyond the scope of this piece, which is really more of a why-to. No worries. Lots of other people have already done the heavy lifting. These are nine good places to start:

“How To Set Up A Professional Website Layout Using WordPress.” Solid video on getting started with WordPress. Everything goes better with a British accent.

“How To Use WordPress As A Truly Customized CMS.” That would be Content Management System. An intermediate overview by a pro designer. Good resource list.

Building A Web Site With WordPress. When you graduate from the overviews, an entire site devoted to the process.

Iconfinder. Search engine that looks exclusively for icons, social media buttons, etc.

“Install WordPress On OSX.” Clearest video tutorial I found on installing MAMP and WordPress on a Mac.

“Windows WAMP Installation For WordPress.” Video. Different platform, same outcome.

“How To Run WordPress On Your Windows Computer Using XAMPP — Part 1.” Video. I’ll trust you to find Part 2 on your own.

“Moving Day.” Easy guide to moving a WordPress site from one place to another. Like your hard drive to online. Be sure to read the comments for additional info and options.

WordPress Codex. Official online software manual.

[Photo by Rhys Asplundh]

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