Website Design Tips from Connie Lee Marie!

Welcome Connie Lee Marie, graphic designer, musician, and Website Goddess!

Amber: Can you share some tips with authors struggling to make their own websites?

Connie: Design your site to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible and your visitor’s experience will be smooth and pleasant.

Save photos and graphics for the web at the smallest file size possible (looking good with details) for fast loading, using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, etc. with the “Optimize for the Web” option.

Amber: You made a great banner for my website. Once I had the banner I used the color and feel to redo the entire site. How important is the header for a site?

Connie: The header is the most important element of website design. It tells the visitor who you are and what the site is about. It’s your first chance to make a good impression.

Amber: What about type size and fonts?

Connie: Here are a few things to remember -

• Never make your type too wide across the page. Wide columns are hard to read and look unattractive. I like a maximum width of approximately 600 pixels (6 inches) for an easy-to-read column and of course, smaller columns of approx. 250+ pixels are great for ease of reading. Newspapers traditionally used skinny columns for a reason!
• Use short paragraphs; line breaks help readability.
• Very long pages (with lots of photos) may take a long time to load and readers will have to do a lot of waiting and scrolling, or worse yet, leave before the page finishes loading!
• Remember to set your links to "Open in new window" (in Dreamweaver set the target to _blank) to encourage visitors to return to your website after they’re done looking at an off-site linked page. Your site will be waiting for them after they close the linked page.
• Typefaces - Very small type is hard to read, especially serif styles. Too large type is also annoying to the eye. Experiment with Verdana or Ariel. I like to keep everything readable. I tend to lean towards san-serif for the web and serif for print. Maybe I’ll change my mind on that someday! Also think about how readable the color of the text is on your background color. Think: Contrast.
• LINES OF ALL CAPS SCREAM AT YOUR VISITOR! REMEMBER NIGERIAN SCAM EMAILS WRITTEN COMPLETELY IN ALL CAPS? - HARD to read and always a NO-NO. Use sparingly.
• Underlining. Also use sparingly.Use only a few words in special situations. Make words Bold if you want them to stand out. Too much underlining can make the type hard to read and also can be confused with links.
• Add italics, bold, underling or ALL CAPS like spice to a dish, to taste. Never use too much!
• I feel the same way about animated gifs or flash. Too much movement becomes tedious and distracting. A little here or there is good; too much can be annoying. (Do I really want to wait to watch some type or graphic dance around on my screen? Most likely I’m out of there before it loads.)

Amber: Can you share some websites you designed and tell us what you especially like about them?

Connie: Here’s my latest website incarnation

I like the Old Town Center site because it matches the style of the building perfectly! I also created an email blast template that matches their site for email marketing with Constant Contact.

I don't usually like dark backgrounds on websites because the type is hard to read, but I do like this one. I also made a matching email blast template for this site.

Connie Lee Marie is an artist, 

graphic designer,

illustrator, 

singer/songwriter, 

musician, 

dancer 

and enjoys 

a little plumbing and home repair 

once in a awhile, but not too often.

 Amber: Connie, please can you give us just one more tip?

Connie: 

“Shuffle the Chi!” 

Translation: Make your website interesting!

Learn more about 

Connie Lee Marie's designs

at her website!

An Author's Website = One Purpose: Get People Interested in Your Book

Welcome marketing expert Phyllis Zimbler Miller.
Phyllis is visiting this week to to talk about author websites.

Have you every clicked through to a book author website to find yourself totally confused?  Is the book fiction or nonfiction?  Is it for sale yet or not yet published?  What does that gorgeous sunset picture have to do with a book on the federal justice system?

How many nanoseconds do you think someone who doesn’t know you will stay on the site before clicking away to someone else’s site where no guessing games are required?

And the solution is NOT to just have a book page on a book site along with hundreds of other book authors. If this is the only place to get advice about your book, you may be helping the sale of other books rather than your own.  Why you ask.  Here’s why:

Have you ever wondered what can happen when you tell someone your book is on Amazon or give out the link www.amazon.com?  The person who has good intentions to buy your book gets to Amazon, gets seduced by something else on offer on the home page, and no sale for you. 

Or the person gets to the home page and can’t remember how to spell your name or your book’s title and, again, no sale for you because, let me tell you from personal experience, the search engine at Amazon is NOT the sharpest tool.

I hope by now I’ve convinced you that you need your own book author website and that you need it to be crystal clear to a first-time visitor what you have on offer.

Let’s look at important elements your book author website needs in order to be a marketing-driven website.  (You do want to SELL your book after all, don’t you?)

But first, in full disclosure mode, I need to state that when my novel "Mrs. Lieutenant" came out in April 2008 I did have a website for it at www.MrsLieutenant.com.  Yet the website at that URL now is a new website done by my business partner and younger daughter Yael K. Miller after we started building WordPress websites for clients.

And that experience leads me to my first point:

•    If at all possible, have a book author website that once up you can control yourself and make changes at the drop of a hat.

If you suddenly get a phone call from your local Borders that the store would like you to join an author panel happening in two days’ time, you want to be able to post that information on your website besides doing other publicity (which we’ll discuss in Part II of this post).
Other top points:

•    Collect email addresses at your website so that you can send out update information to your fans (including that Borders author panel).
•    Provide an excerpt of your book – encourage people to sample your wonderful prose or your brilliant business ideas.
•    Provide book group discussion questions.
•    If appropriate, provide a lesson plan for studying your book’s material in high school or college.
•    Have very clear contact information on the site.
•    Last, but certainly not least, have a very clear BUY button. And if the book isn’t available yet, make that very clear also.  (This is when collecting email addresses can enable you to later send out a publication announcement.)

In Part II we’ll discuss marketing methods to get people to your marketing-driven website.

Thanks Phyllis for being so honest about promoting. I'm looking forward to next week's discussion.  

Phyllis Zimbler Miller (@ZimblerMiller on Twitter) has an M.B.A. from The Wharton School and is an Internet business consultant whose power marketing website is 

http://www.MillerMosaicLLC.com.  

Her company builds book author websites and provides other book marketing services.  

Download now her free report on  

“Power Marketing’s Top 3 Internet Marketing Tips” 

from http://www.CalltoActionWebsites.com 

and check out her company’s information package 

"Marketing-Driven Websites” 

at www.millermosaicllc.com/website-package