This is The Write Now podcast with Sarah Werner. Episode 33, do I need a website?

Welcome to Write Now, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage, you need to pursue your passion and to write every day. I’m your host, Sarah Werner and as many of you know, my day job is not as a writer. I’m a writer because I love to write and I come home at night and I write after work. But during the day I worked for a website design and development agency called Click Rain. That’s click as in clicking a mouse and then rain, as in making it rain. I get that question a lot.

At Click Rain I’m the Senior Content Strategist, which means that it’s my job to outline and prepare for and plan for, and sometimes dictate what needs to happen with the content on a website. Now, the content on a website is the stuff that the website is built to contain.

So you don’t go to a website to look at all the little ones and zeros, and you don’t go to a website to inspect the design. You go to a website to ingest or consume content. So whether that’s the hours of a business or a video that you want to watch, or an interesting story about a person or a product description, or a series of images, whatever it is that you’re consuming on a website, the data that you’re consuming and the way it’s arranged, that’s sort of what I do for a living.

So if you’re familiar with any sort of website creating jargon, it’s my job to work with a client to discover what their needs are and what their goals will be for a new website. I can help them with branding initiatives. So if they’re looking to create a new tagline or just to further refine what their brand is like, so thinking about their brand as a person who is this person, is this person, male or female? What does this person look like and sound like and dress like, and how would they act?

I also help with other branding initiatives such as creating a voice and tone for the organization and just a lot of other stuff there. In addition to branding I do information architecture, which means that I create site maps for websites, which is one of my favorite parts of the job. I always wanted to be a librarian growing up and creating site maps for websites is kind of the next best thing that I’ve found. It’s like being a librarian for the internet. You have all this data and you need to decide where it lives, how it interacts, how to keep people moving through the websites and keep them happy while they’re doing that, giving them what they want and what they need. I also plan for content. So I’ll say, “oh, there needs to be a button here and it needs to say this,” or, “you know, there really shouldn’t be too big of an opening paragraph here because it’ll just get in the way of people getting what they want, which is this information or this information.”

I also help with any copywriting that needs to be done if our copywriter is overwhelmed, which she often is. So I do get to do a little bit of writing, but it’s very different than creative writing. It’s more on the technical side. So if we’re doing a website for a hospital, then I’m writing about different hospital things, whatever the need is. In web writing, I also put in tons of web writing best practices, so how should this paragraph be formatted so it’s easier read on the web? How can we put headers here and here to make things more accessible, to make this content more accessible and usable and useful for readers.

Finally, I also deal with website governance. So after you launch your website, what happens? When do you need to update certain pages and do we have a plan in place for when employee turnover happens and we need to take Jane Smith out of the employee directory and what happens when this content becomes outdated and how often do we need to refresh this content for SEO purposes and how does our blog tie in with our social media strategy? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what I’m saying is if it has to do with content on a website, that’s kind of what I do and it’s really fun and I love it. It lets me be creative and strategic and I also learn, this is my favorite part of the job is I learn a ton of stuff in the process.

I’d also like to use what I’ve learned in my job and what I know in my job and what I convey to clients on an everyday basis to you. So I think that I’ve maybe spoiled the answer to my question.

The question was, as a writer do I need a website? From my ongoing chatter and enthusiasm for websites? I think that you’ve probably garnered by now that my answer is yes. But what I want to get into today is why? Why do I need a website? Like what good will it do for me and then I’m going to get into the how, so, how do I build a website? How much will it cost? How do I know if this is a good idea? So we’ll tackle all of those questions in today’s episode. Do I need a website? The answer is yes.

So let’s back up for a minute and to ask as a writer, do I need an online presence? No matter what your stance on websites are I think that everyone can agree that the answer is yes, unless you’re a Luddite in which case your answer is no, but Luddites aside, yes, you want some kind of online presence.

If you don’t have an online presence, say a Twitter account at the very least, then you really risk being disconnected from a community of writers and perhaps more importantly, your community of readers. One of my favorite things about social media is that I can send a tweet to literally any writer that I want to, one of my favorite writers, William Gibson is on Twitter. At any time, like right this second, if I wanted to, I could send him a tweet that says, I love your books and you’re amazing, but I don’t want to do that because I don’t want to sound like a stalker. But I could do that and by being on Twitter, William Gibson opens himself up to direct communication with his audience, which I think is amazing and wonderful, and really makes me interested in wanting to read more of what he’s written.

It’s also a great place for him to talk about his writing and his writing process and to build what we call a tribe, an audience, or a tribe or a readership, we’ll kind of get into building that up online later. But for now, I just want to say that, yes it’s probably a good idea for a writer to have some kind of web presence.

The question that follows that then is, well, I have a Twitter account or I have a Facebook profile, I have some kind of social media platform presence, why would I need a website? That is an excellent question and for me, it all comes down to ownership.

A few months ago, or perhaps now it’s even a few years ago, there was this big to do about the social media platform Instagram. Instagram is a platform where you upload photos and people can heart them or comment on them and it’s just a lovely way to share those billions of selfies that you take with people around the world. The big to do was regarding Instagram’s policies, one of which had been amended to really sound like Instagram claimed ownership of all pictures posted to Instagram. Think about that for a minute. I mean, I don’t maybe care so much about myself fees, but if you’re a professional photographer who’s using Instagram and just think the minute you upload one of those images to Instagram, you cease holding the rights to that property. That’s a little, yikes. Instagram has since sort of rescinded that policy and rewritten it to make it a little bit more copy rate slash intellectual property ownership friendly. But it raised a very interesting question for me and I hope that it raises an interesting question for you. I know that we’re writers and not photographers, but here’s what I want to posit.

Say, you’re a writer and you have a Facebook profile. You write some things directly into Facebook. You don’t have a website and so you constantly tell people, hey, check out my Facebook profile. You can find some of my writing on there and et cetera, et cetera. What I want you to consider is that you do not own that Facebook page. If Facebook were to shut down next year or tomorrow, anything that you’ve published on Facebook would go away. You’re not in control 100% of the content that you put on Facebook. You don’t own it 100%. You’re using a free third party platform to publish your content and that is definitely not something that I would advise. The same thing is true with Twitter. So if you have a really great Twitter presence and you’ve built that up and you use it to promote your book and share ideas and inspiration and encouragement about writing, that’s awesome. But ultimately you don’t own Twitter. Twitter owns Twitter and Twitter could shut down a week from now, three days from now, tonight and then where would all of your content be?

When I asked the question, do I need an online presence? The answer is yes, but I believe that you need an online presence that you fully own and control. You need a home on the web that is not owned by a third party like Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. You need a home on the web where you can sort of establish a digital base camp and conduct your operations from. So if you have your own website, you do fully own and control it in most circumstances. Having your own website also allows you to more fully brand yourself. You’re not limited by the blue bars and boxes of Facebook or the 140 characters of Twitter, or the fact that you cannot post links in comments within Instagram, you have full control over your brand about how much you say and what you say. No one can flag you for inappropriate content. No one can take down your posts. You can have a strong brand with a logo and your image at yourname.com. It lends you trust and credibility.

So if I’m a writer and I say, hey, check out my Facebook page that’s one thing. But if I’m able to say, hey, go to Sarahwerner.com and read some of my writing. That’s another thing entirely. It’s more professional, it’s more trustworthy. Not to mention the fact that when you own your own website with your own domain, you also get an @yourname.com email address option. So this is why I send you to hello@sarahwerner.com and not like saucylibrarian93@hotmail.com. One just sounds so much more professional and established than the other one. Often perceptions can be everything. If you have your own website, that also gives you the option of having your own blog. A place that you own, where you can share your thoughts and your feelings without having to disclaim like, hey, this doesn’t necessarily reflect the opinions of my employer as you’ve seen so many times on other social media platforms.

In addition to blogging, there are also options within a website for building your readership, building your audience, building your tribe. You may have noticed that I have in the past solicited you to sign up for the Write Now newsletter, by going to SarahWerner.com and filling out the black bar at the top of my website, a lot of marketing in the 21st century is all about building up a loyal audience, a loyal following, people who believe in your message, people who love your writing, people who are willing and excited to buy your next book. By having your own website, you make this audience building, this tribe building a lot more simple and smooth.

So I’ve made a case for why it’s important for a writer to have their own website. In addition to owning all of your content and legitimizing your presence on the web, your website is also what will come up in search results when someone goes to a search engine such as Google or Bing or Yahoo to search for you. You want something to come up and that something should be your website. Additionally, your website can showcase your writing in a way that social media platforms such as Twitter or Facebook really can’t. Finally, and this gets a little bit more into sort of the complex technicalities of building a website, but eventually at the end of the day, your website can also serve as a selling tool for your book. So if you’re selling an ebook, you can set it up through your website that people buy directly from you and then websites like Amazon won’t necessarily have to take, what is it now? 33%, 60%, 80% cut from your sales. So to answer the question, do I need a website? My answer is yes.

So the followup question is, okay, how do I get a website? Do I have to pay some agency $35,000 to make me a new website? The answer to that is no and in fact, this is something that you can do yourself. The absolute most important thing that I can tell you, dealing with the how of building or having a website as an author is that it doesn’t need to be incredibly complex. There are many, many very affordable and or free ways that you can get a website as a writer. I’ll make sure that I link to all of these in today’s show notes at sarahwerner.com, that’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com.

But some of your options include WordPress, which you may have heard about, but there’s two different versions so to speak of WordPress. There’s wordpress.com, that’s W-O-R-D-P-R-E-S-S.com, which takes care of all of the hosting, et cetera for you if you’re not super into the technical details. Then there’s also wordpress.org, W-O-R-D-P-R-E-S-S.org and with that option, you can host it yourself. You can buy the domain wherever you want. You can choose hosting whether it’s at blue host or anywhere else. I host with blue host. It’s a little bit more complex, but it’s also really rewarding to build your own website using wordpress.org. But for beginners, I would recommend using wordpress.com. It’s super easy. You can have your website set up in just a few minutes.

Another great option is Squarespace, which lets you create very simple, beautiful websites, very quickly using a very intuitive sort of dynamic creation tool. You do this all online and it’s very, very easy to do and no, neither WordPress or Squarespace is giving me money to tell you this. I just feel like I need to like say that as a disclaimer, but Squarespace will also let you own your own website. Currently it’s 12 or $13 a month, and that takes care of hosting and everything for Squarespace.

WordPress can vary, it depends if you buy your own URL. So www.yourname.com, that’s your URL, or whether you just go with a free one, so with WordPress that would be www.yourname.wordpress.com. So it kind of depends what you want there. Either way less is more, it’s really easy to get caught up in creating this huge website with all of these different menu items and navigational items and a really complex navigation and interface. But I can’t say this enough, less is always more.

So with either of these options, WordPress and Squarespace, you can set it up to collect emails and you can also set it up to measure analytics. What I mean by that is I have Google Analytics set up on SarahWerner.com. So I know how many visitors I get to my website per day, at what time they’re visiting at what pages they’re going to. None of it’s uniquely identified, so I can’t say like, oh, Patty Smith was on my website from 10:07 AM to 10:12 AM on Saturday, blah, blah, blah. You never know who it is specifically, but you can tell that a visitor was on your website from a certain time to a certain time and they went to probably a number of different pages within your website. You can tell that, oh, this blog post that I wrote about my favorite tools for writing was viewed this many times. Whereas this other piece of content I created was only viewed a couple times, so, okay maybe I should start creating more posts like this other one if they get better results.

Analytics is just a treasure trove of data. If you’re at all the kind of person who likes to analyze or measure what they do, like the results of what you’re doing, it helps me to make a number of very smart decisions for my website, realizing that you get more clicks if you have a button instead of a link, realizing if you get more listeners if you put your podcast in one place versus another place, there’s just a lot of really cool experimenting you can do on a website that you own. So I would encourage you to play around with that a little bit.

I realized while I’m saying all of this, that in encouraging you to make your own website, I should at some point offer some kind of tutorial about website making 101. So I’m going to have to do some brainstorming about what to do with that. Maybe it will be something that people can download from my website. I don’t know. I’ll need to do some planning.

In the meantime, if you ask the question, should I still be on social media once I have my website, because it’s feeling a little redundant, I say, yes. Social media, such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest it’s a great way to drive traffic back to your website, back to that web property that you own. So it’s a great way to in marketing terms, drive traffic and create engagement. So you can tease people with, hey, here are like five tips that you can do about X, Y, or Z, and then link to your website and make sure people are landing on your website onto that space that you own and you control instead of the other way around.

So in case I didn’t reiterate that enough. Yes, you can still be on social media and maybe you should even still be on social media, just make sure that everything you do on social media points back to the website that you own, your name.com, AKA your home online. This week’s book of the week is Flunking Sainthood by Jana Riess. Flunking Sainthood is a nonfiction book and it’s sort of written in a memoir style about a woman who decides to take 12 spiritual practices and take one up for each month of the year and see how she does following them and to see if they actually make her life better and not necessarily more interesting, but more calm and focused and centered.

The subtitle of the book kind of gives away a little bit of what happens in the book and so the full title of the book is Flunking Sainthood, A Year of Breaking the Sabbath, Forgetting to Pray, and Still Loving My Neighbor and the whole thing’s a little bit tongue in cheek, which usually I appreciate. So I read this book for a women’s retreat that I attended this fall and at the outset everyone was raving about how awesome it was and like, oh, this author is so honest and so down to earth and so funny and oh, I wish I could be just like her. So I opened it up and I started to read and I was hooked immediately. She’s a very skilled writer and she has a way of drawing you in to her world with a wink, wink, nudge, nudge, and being very, very relatable.

And I appreciated that her style is very easy to read, very easy to digest and sort of takes you through this 12 months of trials that she put herself through. I know you’re waiting for the but. But this is such a fine balance to strike. That is the balance between being like fun and flippant and dismissing something that might be important to somebody else. Oh, I know this and I’m going to sound like this, like old fuddy duddy, but I kind of don’t care. So she tries these different spiritual practices and then like immediately at the end of each month, she’s like, ha obviously I couldn’t do this and gives up and never thinks about it again. These are spiritual practices, like you can’t just give yoga a try for a month and expect it to like change your life. There’s a difference between a spiritual practice and a magical wish granting. Right? Maybe it’s just me. I don’t know.

Everybody loves this book and I was just like, really she only gave it a month and then she gave up, obviously you’re not going to like find yourself or like find your spiritual centering or anything like that within a month. Or maybe I’m just slow. I don’t know. But I kind of think that these things take time and to commit yourself to whether it’s Christian, Buddhist… whatever it is that you’re committing yourself to spiritually, I think it should take more than a month to experience the fullness and the richness spiritual centeredness can bring to your life before giving up and making fun of it as useless, like ha, ha, ha meditating is dumb because it didn’t work for me within the span of one month. Now I’m off to try something else and it’s like, okay meditation is a time honored practice and practice implies that you have to spend time doing it.

See, now I’m ranting in this old lady fuddy duddy way and okay yeah she had fun trying spiritual practices and it didn’t work, but I think she should have taken a little bit longer to try these things out before dismissing them as useless. So that’s me. Hopefully I’m not a fuddy duddy all the time. I don’t know. Or maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe there needs to be more fuddy duddies in the world. Maybe there needs to be more of people who say fuddy duddy more than once per podcast episode in the world, who knows.

In any case, I was not a huge fan of Flunking Sainthood by Jana Riess but that goes against popular opinion and so if this sounds like something that would be good for you, relatable for you, it is very well written, it’s funny, it’s down to earth and it’s grounded in a way that is relatable because she says, hey, I’m not perfect. I can’t do all of these spiritual practices. And it’s okay if you can’t either. That’s really, I think what people connected to in this book. So if that sounds like something you’re interested in reading, then by all means, go ahead and read it. If not, go ahead and read something else. That’s what I’m going to do.

The Write Now podcast would not happen were it not for several very wonderful, wonderful people. These people include my Patreon supporters, including cool cat Sean Locke, official rad dude Andrew Coons and official bookworm Rebecca Werner. These fine and friendly folks donate a certain specified amount of money per podcast episode. So say $1 or $3 or $5, et cetera, through patreon.com, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com, which is a third party donation platform that allows people to support the artists and makers and creators that create and make things they enjoy. So thank you.

I would also like to thank those of you who took my survey. I sent out a survey recently through email and it was like, hey, what do you like and what do you not like about my podcast? What can I change and how can I make this something the better helps you and better encourages you to write every day? So if you have not yet taken my survey and you want to, all you have to do is go to Sarahwerner.com. That’s S-A-R-A-H-W-E-R-N-E-R.com/survey. It’s right there available for you to take, there’s only a couple questions and I do invite you to be brutally honest and so if you’re like, your podcast is the worst. Let me know and let me know how I can change it so that it’s not the worst. Or if you think I’m doing a good job, that’s okay too.

So, hey, let me know what you think. If you’ve had a website before and it just wasn’t working for you, or if you have a website now and you’re seeing great results, if you’ve never had a website and are kind of hesitant or curious about starting one, let me know your thoughts. You can comment on the show notes for today’s episode at sarahwerner.com. You can also go to my website and navigate to the contact page and fill up a little form there and that just shoots me an email at hello@sarahwerner.com. I will read it and respond to you because I like doing that. As mentioned, you can also email me directly at hello@sarahwerner.com.

I feel like this has been a really long and rambly episode, but hopefully it contains some good information that will help you along the way, whether it’s with sort of pairing down your current web presence or creating one a fresh, I wish you the best of luck.

If you have any questions while you’re working on your website, let me know, I’d be really curious and eager to help you. I’m also now thinking about putting together a sort of how to guide for writers who are interested in creating their own websites. So if that’s something that you would be interested in, let me know, and I’ll start thinking about how to create that.

With all that in mind, this has been episode 33 of The Write Now podcast, the podcast that helps aspiring writers to find the time, energy and courage you need to pursue your passion and to writes every day. I’m Sarah Werner and I hope you are having an amazing day.