I had a lot of trouble getting this process operational, and I think that was partly due to the website builder I am using, Elementor. I tried Brevo and Mailchimp using the Elementor subscription form, but I kept on getting error messages from Elementor. There were so many points where something could have been the cause of the problems. The marketing automation services might not have been able to communicate with Elementor’s blog feed or subscription form. Using an Elementor blog page instead of the WordPress theme’s default blog page might have prevented the services from recognising my blog page and its feed. I could have also failed to set up the campaigns correctly.  I finally tried MailerLite and used its form rather than the Elementor form. It added subscribers to the list on my MailerLite account and, when tested, sent out a very nice-looking update email.

So, after about eight hours of work, things are looking good.

Advantages of Having an Author Website

When asked about the advantages of having an author website, they said a website:

• Is a point of contact where readers can find you (6)
• Is a place to sell books (6)
• Can be used for marketing and advertising (5)
• Is a place where readers can get to know the author (4)
• Helps authors control the information given out to the public (3)
• Can be used to inform readers of upcoming news and events (2).

What Should an Author’s Website do?

The survey then asked authors/writers to tick which functions they thought a website should have:

• Advertise their latest releases (21)
• Inform readers who the author is and what they write (19)
• Include links to where readers can buy the author’s books (18)
• Include a back catalogue of the author’s publications (18)
• List upcoming events, such as book readings and writer’s festivals, that the author will be participating in (18)
• Create a brand for the author (16)
• Direct readers to the author’s social media (15)
• Include a blog so readers can interact with the author (11)
• Include a newsletter sign-up form or subscription to a mailing list form so the author can advertise their books (11)
• Sell books directly to readers (11).

One item that should have been on that list is that a website can be a very convenient first port-of-call to which an author can direct media, an agent or a publisher.

Essential Functions of an Author Website

Based on the author’s responses,  a website should be/include:

• A place for readers to find out who an author is and what they write
• Updatable so it can advertise an author’s latest release
• Show what books an author has for sale (half the authors wanted an e-commerce site that sells directly to the customer, and most of the rest just wanted links to where a reader could buy the books)
• List upcoming events an author is involved in (for some, this could take the form of a blog)
• Links to social media.

A Basic Author Website

Based on the author’s responses, a basic author website must do/contain the following:

• Tell a reader who the author is and their writing genre (it is incredible how many author websites don’t immediately inform, through image, text or style, what genre the author writes)
• List the author’s books and have links to where they can be bought
• Be easily updated to plug the author’s latest release (probably on the homepage).
• A news section that is easily updated with the latest author news (this could take the form of a blog that details upcoming events)
• Contact details for customers, as well as the media, agents or publishers
• Links to social media.

A More Complex Author Website

• If an author wants to avoid paying Amazon and iBooks a commission, or they want to make it easier for the customer, they could choose to sell directly from their website.
• If an author enjoys blogging and interacting with readers, a blog could be included (new content like blog posts help with SEO)
• I would also suggest authors have a newsletter or a subscription form so readers can be emailed information about new releases or upcoming events.

If you can think of any other functions that should be included on an author’s website, please leave them in the comments section.

Domain Registration Rip-off

The rip-offs and scams started straight after I registered my business when I received a letter from www.registry.com.au offering me a domain name for my business at the bargain price of $99. This organisation obviously relies on a new business owner not knowing that domain name registration costs only about $15 and is usually free when you sign up with a website hosting service.

Designer Spam

When I signed up with a hosting service for my website, I immediately received several phone calls and emails from website designers wanting to design my website. They hadn’t bothered to check out my website and see I was a website designer and then conclude that I would not want a website designed by someone else. When told I was a web designer, the more alert caller would immediately go into a spiel about the possibility of me contacting work out to them.

Contact/Product Review Spammers

A few of the websites I have constructed have contact forms that spammers use if I don’t put Captcha on them. I also construct e-commerce sites that often allow customers to comment on or review individual products; again, spammers use them.

Merchant Credit Card Scam

Just recently, I received an email from a potential client who said they were hard of hearing. They wanted to discuss the project only via email rather than Zoom or over the phone.

They said they wanted an ecommerce fashion website. They told me the products they were selling and they wanted customers to be able to buy them in different sizes and colours. After prompting, they gave me the URL of a fashion website they liked. I spent a few hours creating an example website based on that website. I then sent an email asking what they thought of the example with an initial quote of the cost.

She (?) emailed me back, saying she wanted to pay me immediately in full. This surprised as I had told her I operate on a 50% deposit and then 50% on completion basis. She said she only had a credit card and wanted to pay with that. I sent back an email saying PayPal accepts credit cards, so she could use them to pay me. She replied that she didn’t want to use PayPal or Square because they had ripped her off. She wanted me to set up a merchant credit card account.

I was starting to become suspicious. I ran a search on her gmail address and found nothing on the web. She had a rather unique name, so unique that when I searched on Google and Facebook it did not come up at all.

More in interest than anything else, I rang the banks about setting up a merchant credit card account. The banks thought my client’s behaviour was very suspicious. They told me merchant credit card facilities can be defrauded with stolen credit cards.  Is this what the client was up to? One bank suggested setting up a BPay account.

Just in case the client had just set up their email account, used a pseudonym online, were hard of hearing, and genuinely did not trust PayPal, I sent them an email. I said my business’ bank did not have merchant credit card accounts (which they didn’t) and suggested we use BPay. I also asked for more details about her business. It has been a week, and I haven’t heard back from them. I am still wondering how they planned to use the merchant credit card system to rip me off.

Refund Scam

Finally, last week I received a badly written message from a contact form on one of my example e-commerce websites. A person said they had paid for an unnamed product and not received it. They wanted their money back. The product was meant to be a birthday gift for their wife. As the site was not capable of accepting payments they could not have paid for it.

I am sure my business will be subject to more spam, attempted scams and rip-offs. I wish no one would fall for these scams so the scammers would give up and stop wasting our time.  As for spammers, at least do some research before you spam to see if someone could actually need your service. And don’t use the review sections of products and contact forms on websites because it just annoys people and gives you no chance of a positive response to your spam.

When a search is conducted on Google, the results page (SERP) includes different types of results.  For the search “Website Design Wangaratta” (shown below), the top two positions are taken up by paid ads. The two businesses listed are not based in Wangaratta but are national services.

The following three results (under the map) are Google Business Listings, a free Google service. Google allows websites to be registered at a business’s physical location. The business needs a physical presence at that location; it can’t be just an online business that says it “operates”  in a particular location.

When a search is conducted, Google Business Listings shows what Google judges as the top three registered businesses for that service or product in a particular area. In the example above, Wangaratta Website Design Services appears in the second position of the Google Business Listings.

If a user clicks on one of the three businesses listed, further details about that business will be shown, including a link to the business’s website. If a user clicks on “more places” at the bottom of the business listings, all the businesses that have registered to sell that product or service at that particular location will be shown.

To get one of the coveted top three business listing positions depends on how helpful Google judges a website to be. This can be influenced by the site’s Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). More about that soon.

The third section of a SERP is the organic results. My business currently comes up third in these results when someone searches for “Website Design Wangaratta”. A website’s position in the organic results depends on several factors, including SEO and how often consumers click on a website’s search result link.

SEO

Responsive website

Several factors influence Search Engine Optimisation. The most important is having a website that is responsive and, therefore, optimised for viewing on a mobile phone. This is because Google judges all websites by their functionality on a mobile phone. Many websites created a few years ago are not responsive.

Keywords

The second factor that influences SEO is a website’s content. Google bots will search a new site and index its information for relevance to particular searches. Optimising a website for specific keywords can influence this indexing.

A keyword is a word or phrase that people will search for. The more specific the keyword, the more likely people are to search for that keyword. For example, a business might sell cars. Having cars as a keyword in the website’s content is not very specific. A person would not just search for cars as the results could include every car make and model, car mechanics, hire car firms, the pop group, etc.

If the searcher is after a second hand Toyota Hilux for sale in Shepparton, they will eventually change the search to something like “Used Hilux Shepparton”.  To be found in such a search, a second-hand dealer of Toyotas in Shepparton should ensure the words “used Hilux” and “Shepparton” appear in the content of their website.

Keywords should also appear in a website’s title, page titles and description, and the website’s schema. A schema is code inserted into a website designed to inform search engines what the website is about. Schemas can tell a search engine many things, like where the website’s business is located and the individual products on a website.

Sitemaps/Robot.txt

Search engines can also be helped to index a site by including a sitemap and a robot.txt file in a website’s directory. A sitemap shows the search engine what is on a website, while a robot.txt file tells it what pages/files to search, so the search engine doesn’t index pages that aren’t viewable by a user.

Website authority

The authority of a website also influences SEO. A website’s authority is derived from several factors, like the number of links made to it from other websites. The higher the authority of these linking websites, the better. Authority also depends on things like online reviews of a business and citations about the website or business elsewhere on the web, such as in social media, of things like the business name, address and phone number.

From personal experience, the authority of a website primarily chasing local business does not seem to be as important as the authority needed by a website chasing national business with national competitors.

When a potential client contacts me, these are some of the preliminary questions I am likely to ask.

1. What does your business do?

2. How long has it been operating?

3. Do you currently have a Website?

If yes:

• What is or isn’t working for you on it?
• Do you want a totally new website or one that incorporates aspects of your current website?

4. Why do you want a new website?

5. What are your goals for the website?

6. What do you want to include on your website?

7. What do you want your website to emphasise about your business?

8. Do you plan to sell anything directly from your website?

If yes:

• How many different products or services are you planning to sell?
• Do you have images of these products?

9. Who is your target audience?

10. Do you have any brand guidelines for your business?

11. Who are your main rivals?

12. What differentiates your product or service from your competition?

13. Are there any websites with features that you would like your site to have?

14. What is your budget for this project?

15. When do you want the website built?

So before you call or email, think about your answers to the above. Getting answers to the above will help ensure that I am on the right track to designing the best website possible for you.

Graham Clements.

The process involved introducing Bootstrap to the site’s pages. Bootstrap is a form of CSS that allows rows of columns of information to be set up and for the rows to break into columns as the screen size gets smaller. A desktop monitor would usually show a full row of 12 columns of information. However, a tablet’s smaller screen might only show nine columns of information of a particular row across the screen, while the other three columns are moved down to the next section of the screen. Similarly, a mobile might only show six columns of a particular row. The changes I made did require some adjustments to the format of the page to get its aesthetics right.

I had to recode the menu so that on a smaller screen the normal menu at the top of a computer screen converts to a hamburger menu on a mobile. I also included some @media tags for items such as the banner, which allows different-sized banners to be displayed depending on the screen size. So, a small banner would be shown on a mobile.

Overall, the conversion process took about 12 hours, and I’m pleased with the result. You can view the updated site at www.grahamclementsauthor.com. The image above shows how the homepage used to appear.

Cheers,

Graham.