Comments on: Building an author website, Part 2: putting your assets together

By: Fiona

Fiona — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:55:07 +0000

Hello both! Nick, it’s good to hear about your experiences of Weebly. For a free tool it seems pretty good and not so steep a learning curve for someone getting online for the first time. Your next project sounds v. exciting and WordPress I’m sure would meet most if not all of your needs. To answer your second post, yes I use Google Analytics, as do many others. It has extremely detailed information on visitors and where they come from, and – importantly – how long they spend on your site (‘stickiness’). Most interesting for me is the info on traffic sources, i.e. how people find you – whether through search (and what search terms people have used); direct visits; referrals from other websites (I get a LOT of visits from my Twitter profile, so that tells me it’s worth the time I invest in Twitter). You can also measure the number of new visitors compared to repeat visitors. Being able to see your site grow month by month in terms of traffic helps to sustain motivation, so yes GA is a good tool to use.

Kathleen, I’m delighted that WordPress is working out so well for you. Re the photo at the top of your page, you should be able to customise this with one of your own – a montage of all your writers would look fab! As for domain name renewal you can absolutely go for another provider; you aren’t tied in at all. Be sure to tell GoDaddy why you’re leaving. ‘A complaint is a gift’ is always my motto!

Thanks for sharing your experiences and questions, N. and K. Fiona x

By: Nick Le Mesurier

Nick Le Mesurier — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 07:41:29 +0000

Do you use Google Analytics to track the visits your sites receive? http://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/analytics/ I’ve just signed up for free and wondered if anyone had experience of it, or any other means of tracking activity?

Weebly offer a basic summary of page views, updated daily and presented in a graph. I have no idea if the information is accurate or just made up. Sometimes I get a hundred page views in a single day. I wonder who from?

By: Kathleen Dixon Donnelly

Kathleen Dixon Donnelly — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 14:03:56 +0000

Thanks, Fiona! You turned me on to Word Press, and I have found it much more flexible than Blogger, which I have used for a long time. I haven’t gotten around to adding photos yet [even one of me! I should take your advice…], but I update every day and then every month. I’ve been able to put up a lot more information than I could on Blogger: http://www.suchfriends.wordpress.com.
The picture at the top of the template looks good, but is not really related to my subject–writers!–so I’d like to change that when I have time to play around with it some more.
In the meantime, I got a domain name–gypsyteacher.com–through the GoDaddy site, which someone in the States recommended to me. I haven’t had any problems with it [lately], just use it for e-mail, but I really hate their sexist marketing campaign. Can I move? I’m up for renewal [it’s really cheap]. Could I drop them and take ‘gypsy teacher’ with me? Anyone out there know?

By: Nick Le Mesurier

Nick Le Mesurier — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 08:23:57 +0000

This is a very straightforward article, fiona, with lots of useful advice.

A quick note on Weebly http://www.weebly.com/ which I use for my site http://www.nicklemesurier.org.

I chose them because an entry on google identified them as one of TIME’s top 50 websites of 2007 and they seemed to have drawn lots of attention from the press. The basic package is free, and to someone with no knowledge of html very easy to use. It is all drag and drop stuff. As you say, if you use the free package your domain will include the weebly name. For less than £40 I bought my current domain for two years. I’d wanted nicklemesurier.com but it seems someone else had got in before me!
The site offers a number of templates and you can upload articles, links, photographs, videos and so on. The templates are not the very bestI’ve seen – yours is much more attractive and its all a little bit static – but they are quite good and there are a lot of them. The site is generally easy to manage, though there are certain times of the day when it runs very slowly, probably when more American users are online. I also find I often get a cute ‘Oops, we’ve encountered a problem. Please try that again’ message when editing, which is annoying.
Frankly, I’m thinking about changing and probably won’t use them for my next site which will be a feature for older writers.