for Authors

Or, How Not to List Your Books in Such a Way as to Make Your Readers Rend Their Garments in Despair. Another common question from the RWA talk: "What content should the site have?" Or, put another way, "What do readers want?" I like this question. I'm going to talk about it at … [Read more...] about Website Content: The Book List

A quickie while I get back up to speed: why contests are not effective promotional tools for authors. … [Read more...] about Contests and freebie sluts

Knowledge of web standards. A good, recent portfolio. Make sure that at least one site was done within the last calendar year. Someone you arenÃ¢â … [Read more...] about What to look for in a professional web designer

[For those coming in from Ma.gnolia, it might be helpful to know, until I get my category tags fixed, that this is part of my web design for authors series.] The choice between designing a site yourself or hiring someone to do it for you is a lot like the choice between … [Read more...] about On hiring designers, FrontPage, and your 12-year-old nephew

In my cost overview I nattered on about Dreamweaver's standards compliance and Frontpage's lack thereof. There are a number of reasons this is important, and The Dollars and Sense of Building to Standards summarizes them nicely. Jeffrey Zeldman lays it on the line in 99.9% of … [Read more...] about Why web standards matter

What qualifies me to tell you anything at all about web design? I am a professional web designer. I'm not a freelancer, though, so I'm not out to make my paycheck — or in fact any money at all — off authors. I'm a full-time in-house webmaster for a university, where … [Read more...] about Belated intro

As I mentioned yesterday, you should pay no more than $10/month to host a typical, modestly successful site. Start with a basic package; you can always upgrade if you need more disk space than you anticipated or your site draws an unexpected amount of traffic. Basic packages, … [Read more...] about Hosting and domains

Last fall, my friend Sarah and I gave a talk on web design for her RWA chapter. We sent out a little survey ahead of time to find out what people wanted to know — and, implicitly, how much they knew about web design in general. (I didn't think I was going to find much web … [Read more...] about How much does a website cost?

People often ask me to recommend web books. I always have to get more specific: You want beginner, intermediate, or advanced? What are you trying to achieve? Some people will say that they want to learn HTML, when the truth is that they'd be just as happy letting software write … [Read more...] about Web Design Curriculum