Tips and Tricks for Designing Your Author Website

Tips and Tricks for Designing Better Author Website

This article will share some useful tips and tricks for making your author website design better, prettier and the process faster. From a WordPress tool that makes designing super easy to design tips, using these will help you design a better website.

Everybody knows that you need a website as an author these days. But it can be confusing and very research-intense process if you have to start from zero. There 

1. Use Elementor to speed up your design process

If you are or will use WordPress for your website, probably the single most powerful tip and simplification for designing it would be to install Elementor page builder and use it design your website. It’s a fantastic time-saver, it’s a bit like Canva, in terms of it being a design tool that is really simple to use and is actually even available for free. It does NOT make you a great designer because it’s easy to use, but it cuts down on design time significantly?

How does it help?

By allowing you to design pages and posts and other parts of website with a drag-and-drop interface. 

By having ton of templates (even in free version) that save time and allow you not to design from a blank page, which is the hardest way to start design. 

It even includes things like Pop ups for collecting emails of readers, contact forms, and other utilities that will not need to be bought separately because of Elementor.

It’s a fantastic tool, I use it to design this website and all of my future websites. It has taken over the WordPress industry and beaten older competitors like Divi or Thrive Architect and is beloved by people who use it. 

Here is a small preview of how it works:

2. One page – one call to action

This is not a design thing visually, but it’s a crucial thing for how easy your website is to use and how well it converts Visitor to an email Subscriber etc. 

There is a rule of thumb to apply for any page you create, whether your homepage, or Book page or About page etc, and it is to have only one call-to-action per page. So don’t ask the reader to do multiple things on one page, don’t ask them to leave their email address AND contact you using your contact form AND visit your Facebook AND something else. It would be confusing and confusing is the SIN on the internet. 

Why?

Because of thing called Hicks’ Law. The more options person is given, the more time they will take to decide and online, this means the more time something takes the more likely person is to leave your website. Think about it, when you visit a website, you just want to have everything clear, concise and not confusing. If the website is anything but that, you click ‘Back’ button or the ‘X’ on the tab and quit instantly. So that is what you have to keep in mind for others on your website too. People are easily distracted online, in rush and only looking for what’s in it for THEM!

Go through every single page (if you already have the site done) and make sure your pages are focused. For homepage this might mean that you only ask them to leave their email address in exchange for your reader magnet, or focus on showing them the newest release only instead of showing all books at once etc. Or if you write blog posts, don’t ask people to read your next article AND share your post AND leave an email address etc. One thing should be the call-to-action, on some posts it would be to leave an email address, on others it’s sharing etc 

3. Visual Blurb Technique

4. Avoid ‘Walls of text’

5. Optimize images with TinyJPeg

6. Serif VS Sans Serif fonts

7. Mobile Optimisation

8. Not more than 3 fonts 

9. No double-menus

10. Above the Fold 

11. No Cheesy stocks

12. Avoid Sliders – 

13. Don’t neccessarily avoid Pop-ups!

Topics

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This is not the final list of articles. AWG will be maintained and updated every month to keep it relevant and will have more articles, resources and tips added as time goes. The goal is to make this THE most useful author website information source online. If you find it useful, please share it or any article with your author friend who might need it!