Not Writing, But All the Other Bits (Part Two — the Website)
As promised, here is the second part of my website-building adventure, where I list the software and services that I opted for. But first, a little history.
A few years ago when I built my original website I started with Squarespace, a popular website builder, without doing much research on the subject. I constructed a site that was quite basic, I used it for a while, and then realised that I’d need to upgrade to a business plan to get some of the extra features I wanted. It was enough of a price jump to make me stop and actually consider my needs — both now and in the future — and to apply a little more critical thinking to the decision. Cue spreadsheets (I love spreadsheets), and a more informed picture started to emerge.
Ultimately I decided on a self-hosted WordPress solution. This was driven by the simple goal of getting the most features that I could for the lowest ongoing commitment. Using a Squarespace business plan as a pricing benchmark, I found that doing it myself was both cheaper, with more immediate functionality, and with far more potential to expand in the future.
It sounds too good to be true, right? Cheaper and more powerful? Well, yes. Kind of. The catch is that cheaper and more powerful doesn’t mean easier — in fact, quite the opposite. Imagine one of those triangle diagrams with the words cheap, easy and powerful at each corner, and you have to pick any two. All of which means that if, like me, you choose to prioritise cost and features, it also means committing to a significantly higher time investment. When you start from a position of little-to-no experience you’ll need to go through what is essentially a crash-course in website building and all its periphery — I’ll leave it up to you to decide whether it’s worth it.
Just a word of warning though. If the last few weeks have taught me anything, it’s that there’s always far more to learn that what you initially think. I started with bullet points of the basic features of a website, and started to deep dive into each one. And very quickly realised that each of these aspects is an industry unto itself. My bullet points suddenly turned into a mind map like this:
And it was at that point that I understood that this website would be a continuous process of learning, understanding and evolving. Is it worth the headspace? I can’t answer that for you, but I will say that on more than one occasion I questioned whether I just should have paid the extra money for a Squarespace business plan. After all, the not-insignificant time investment that I’ve spent could have gone towards writing, beta-reading, learning, etc. I certainly don’t regret my decision, partly because I get super excited by learning new stuff, but make sure you go down the path that works for you.
In the meantime, here are the initial decisions I made. Feel free to reach out to me if you want more information on any of these, and I can go into a bit more depth. NOTE — I’m not affiliated with any of the below, or get any sort of incentives. Again, just an honest account of my choices, and no guarantee that some of these won’t change in the future.
Hosting
There’s more hosting companies out there than you can shake a very large stick at, with each company offering a multitude of options; shared hosting, dedicated hosting, virtual hosting, with significant price differences between them and not a great deal of certainty which would be the most appropriate.
I selected A2 hosting and paid for a 3 year shared hosting solution up front to reduce costs. A2 were reasonably priced, get consistently positive feedback, and have good WordPress support. I figure that if I hit the limits of shared hosting I can always upgrade to dedicated.
Website
The site itself is built on WordPress with the Divi plugin. Divi is a tool that helps to visually build your pages and site, and I found that it gave me the versatility of a website builder while still being inside the WordPress ecosystem. It made a lot of things far simpler as it bridged the gap between what I was already familiar with, and the scary unknown world of WordPress.
Divi also comes with a few extras that were things I specifically wanted, namely social media sharing buttons and popup subscription forms (Monarch and Bloom). It also meant that I could use the Divi marketplace to purchase additional layout plugins, such as Divi Blog Extras by Divi Extended, which I use to style the front page. I could have done the same through more manual labour and CSS, but I decided to draw the line somewhere.
Analytics
In addition to the Jetpack plugin (free version) which provides basic visitor stats, I also use Google Analytics and Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools) for a more granular look at the site. At this point I’m not looking for much beyond simple visitor counts, but at least it’s all set up for when I want more data. Analytics and stats is something I could see myself getting really obsessed with, so I’m purposely keeping it simple and at arms length.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation is a topic that I’m still learning (a lot) about, and seems hideously complicated. When I mentioned about various aspects of a site being an industry in itself, it was SEO that I was mostly thinking about.
Gaming the Google search results to put your site at the top has obvious benefits but to be honest, I’m not sure how fanatical I want to be. I’m trying to grow a readership base through people specifically visiting after reading my books, rather than any sort of top ranking on random Google searches.
I use a WordPress plugin called Yoast (free version) to do basic site analysis and to suggest improvements, and then I go as far as making sure pages and images have appropriate naming, captions and descriptions.
Ads
The site has no ads, and at this point I have no interest in trying to monetise it in any way. When I publish new books I’ll add them to a special section with an Amazon link, but that’s about it.
Mailing Lists
A surprisingly deep topic, owing to the fact that there are lots of solutions with their own pros and cons. And every solution, apart from rolling out fully manual workflows, has the potential to be very expensive. I ended up choosing MailPoet on their generous free tier, which allows up to 1000 subscribers and unlimited emails. I figure that if I get popular enough to have over 1000 subscribers, it means I can justify the premium costs as a business expense.
Summary
Phew. This blog post turned out way longer than I anticipated, considering I barely went into any sort of detail! As far as the technical requirements go, that’s the major points. And all this time I haven’t even mentioned the most important thing, which is of course to add regular content. I’m aiming for a post every week, but the key is to make sure it’s interesting content — no filler. The challenge has been set, the gauntlet thrown down, etc. etc. See you on the other side!
Originally published at https://darcyarmstrong.com on November 2, 2020.
