When every day you receive an email from a different website developer offering to design a new site for you, complete with razzle-dazzle graphics and up-to-the-minute Search Engine Optmization (SEO), well, then you know it’s time to act. Time to build a new home in Cyberspace.
How hard can it be, right? What you don’t expect are these existential questions. What IS a website, anyway? If you’re an author, is it just an engine to sell, sell, sell your books? For some, maybe. But for most, I think it’s a heckuva lot more than that. I remember back in the day, when the Internet was in its infancy, how after publishing a book a writer-friend discovered a review online . . . a nasty, negative piece of work. Search her name and that review was the only thing you would find. Was she upset? I drew one obvious conclusion: I needed a website to defend against the hostiles. Trust me, they are out there, now in far greater numbers than ever before. A redoubt, then. A bastion, a fortress, a castle. And while you’re building this castle, and going beyond the utilitarian, why not try to create something beautiful? Maybe think of it as a citadel — as a glorious citadel that commands and defends a city. Too much? Am I getting carried away? Of course, I’ve heard the nay-sayers. A website? they say. Why bother? A website is so yesterday. Well, maybe for some. But not for writers it’s not. Not for those who have stories to tell. And so after poking around, investigating author sites, I decided to call in the pros at AuthorBytes. What you see above is a wireframe — part of a siteplan, if you will. What else can I tell you? A citadel is nothing without a populace — not just to defend but to celebrate. So, yes, helping to populate this site will keep me out of trouble for the next while.