Artistic Design and Publisher Website Aesthetics

Search Engine Love Is Blind but Title Rules

The well known architectural principle of "form follows function" is even better suited to websites than to buildings. The most beautiful website I've ever spent time exploring belongs to a well founded NYC based literary publisher. The graphics are stunning, the presentation is classy, and I'm sure every author with a book in their catalog has sent friends and family to view their bio page.The navigation is excellent, and the content is comprehensive in describing the mission and offerings of the press. They did so many things right that I have no doubt it required great effort and expense. The site is also invisible to search engines for all searches except the publisher name, which is fortunately the same as the domain name, or they would have been dependent on the kindness of strangers for proper linking to appear in the results. If it was your site, as an author, I can pretty much guarantee you that nobody would ever come. Invisible.

It's all wrong from the perspective of building a platform based on Internet search, because the site was constructed entirely in Flash, a rich multimedia presentation software that gives the designer total artistic control over the presentation. That control comes at a steep cost. In this case, all of the "text" on the site, the book descriptions, the company history, the author bios, even the navigation links, exist as images or as programming instructions, not as regular text. The result is that the search engines can't see any of the content on the site, or rather, they can't interpret what it's all about. I suspect this was more of an ommision than a design goal with the publisher, and assuming that Internet visibility isn't a core part of their business strategy, it's not hurting them badly. While the only visitors the site will get will be people who set out to go there, they'll get a good show when they arrive. Unless, of course, they don't have the latest version of Flash installed. In that case, they'll just see a message telling them to please download and install the latest version of Flash, it will only take a minute on a fast connection. It is possible to provide alternative text for search engines when using Flash, but the designers didn't bother, and in any case the search engines don't take it as gospel because it could all be a lie.

If somebody is funding you with millions of dollars to become an author, you can start by building a museum quality website if that's your fancy. If you're building you first website as an author, unpublished or published, aesthetics are an expensive luxury. When I say expensive, I'm refering to time more than to money. I've been a pied piper of establishing a web presence for years now, an essay I wrote describing the Internet as "The Path to Publication in the 21st Century" was even published in couple editions of Jeff Herman's Guide back around the turn of the millenia. So I've personally coached, and tried coaching, many writers and small businessmen through the process of establishing a web platform. It's a good thing I never charged for the service because my failure rate was embarrassingly high, it and always came down to the same thing. Authors who have never published before have this insane fear of making fools of themselves, when the insurmountable obstacle for most is finding somebody who is willing to pay attention long enough to laugh. Worrying about getting everything on your website just perfect before finding out whether or not anybody will ever come is plain dumb.

In the spirit of the fanaticism that's part and parcel with promoting a cause, I want to make clear that there's no room for compromise on the artistic issue! I've seen the endless pre-launch dithering sidetrack and destroy an author's chances of building web platform again and again. So while not exactly a compromise, I've come up with a two step plan for launching a website that will maximize the author's chance of success in actually creating a platform of value while allowing for aesthetics to play a role. I could break it into many more steps to reduce the complexity of the tasks, but I think the two step method is more likely to keep the author on the straight and narrow.

Step 1. Build a text based website, knock it out in simple two column format, links to the left, content to the right, and put it on the web, or pay a college kid some beer money to put it on the web for you. Then spend all the effort you can stomach getting links to the site, without which it's all a waste of time.

Step. 2. When you're getting a couple hundred visitors a day from the search engines, do whatever the hell you want with the website aesthetics, just don't change any of the page names, or remove any of the text.

The right domain name can help you establish a theme for your website and will contribute a little to the search visibility of your site for the words in the name, but for authors, it's not worth breaking open your wallet over. Many famous authors use their name for the domain name if they are able to get it. For an unknown author who nobody is searching for, it's not going to help and may even hurt in the short term if it's hard to spell. If I could have it over again, I would have gone with a different domain name form my www.fonerbooks.com site simply because I've gotten tired spelling "foner" for people over the phone-er. When you're having a conversation with somebody, whether in person or over the phone, and they ask for your website address, it's better if they can guess the spelling without asking. But it's not worth getting your heart set on some name that somebody else has taken and paying them for it or putting your plans on hold because you can't get it. Of all the elements involved is designing an author platform, the domain dame is the least important.

If you work primarily in one area, an easy to remember ".com" domain name incorporating some key words from your specialty is a reasonable way to go. Despite all of the speculation on domain names, by being a little flexible, you can always find one that encompasses the theme you want without getting ridiculously long to do it. Lets say you work in the competitive field of romance novels. You'd think all the good names are already taken, but while you're obviously late to the party to get www.romancenovels.com (first registered in 1996), www.romancenovelsdiva.com was available when I just checked. So were www.romancenovelsauthor.com (which surprised me), and the singular, www.romancenovelauthor.com. Clearly, even if these had been taken, there would be plenty of alternatives available, like www.romanceauthorsusan.com for authors named Susan. All of these are easy enough to spell and contain a couple key words for which you'd like to enhance your search visibility. As long as we're on the topic, I still recommend the original domain name registrar for the United States, www.networksolutions.com, even though they are far from the cheapest. They answer their phones if you have a problem, they aren't going to go out of business, and at around $15/year if you pay for several years in advance, it's not that big a deal.

Paying for a unique domain name costs less per year than a decent dinner for one in a restaurant, and high quality website hosting is available for $10 per month. So the cash carrying cost for an author website will be less than $150 per year, unless you buy a lot of services you don't need, like fancy shopping carts and other extensions. This cost includes all of the usage tracking you need to fully understand what's going on with your website. Website design software can be had for free, you can use free services like Blogger.com to publish a professional blog to your own website, and you can even generate web pages out of most word processors if you check for "HTML" under the "save as" options. I think it's best in the long run to find a nice little website design package that suits you, try out free download versions and then pay for the full version when you find the one you like. Stay away from expensive design packages intended to produce flashy sites to wow visitors. The sites they produce work poorly with the search engines, and you'll waste a ton of time on aesthetics that you should be spending writing or becoming known.

The only real out-of-pocket cost to establish a website comes if you aren't willing to learn the basics of creating and publishing pages, and you end up paying somebody. I would encourage you very strongly to learn to do it yourself, even if you have to pay somebody to teach you Website design requires a knowledge of the written content, and as the writer, you're the pretty much the only one who will have that knowledge. But, if you do have to hire somebody, don't hire a professional website designer. Hire a student or a neighbor who has built their own simple website, and pay by the hour for closed-end tasks. A simple design like the page you are looking at now is the best way to start, feel free copy the layout. It's a table with two columns and two rows, my company logo is in the top row, left column, and the title and copyright management information are in the top row, right column. The navigation is in the bottom row, left column (along with repeated copyright information) and the main content, along with bottom navigation, is all in the bottom row right column. Here's the whole design in miniature, with the table cell borders shown:

Top Left - Logo Top Right - Title and Copyright

Bottom Left - Navigation, Contact and Copyright Bottom Right - Content and Bottom Navigation

A simple table form automatically resizes to fit within screen being used if there's enough content to stretch it out that far. It won't always look exactly the same on every computer, but who cares? This section of my website, the a half dozen pages with the navigation bars, titles, and space for the content, took less than a half hour to set up, It's just a question of creating the first simple page with all the navigation links, and than saving it under different page names. You may hear the word "template" in talking to web designers. That first page created serves as a template in this case, it doesn't need be any more complicated than that. After you have the collection of pages created, you just go to each one, edit the title, and start filling in the content in this bottom right table cell. Cutting and pasting from your word processor works fine. Once you have a simple template, you can actually create web pages in the WordPad program that's been part of Windows Accessories forever without learning HTML. When I feel like editing a web page from a computer other than my own, I just save it from the web, use WordPad to make the changes, and send it back.

If you are hiring somebody to do these tasks,sit and do it with them. The amounts of time involved are so small that you can certainly spare it, you'll learn something, and maybe they'll learn something as well. The hourly wage for such work is going to vary depending where you live, but $20/hour is great pay for a kid most places, you might want to go higher with an adult since you won't be using a whole lot of their time, and everybody has overhead to deal with. The work of creating the website is not about the template, the navigation, or the logo. It's about writing the content. Writing content accounts for more than 99% of the time invested, the opportunity cost to get your website online. After that, the time invested goes into getting links, learning from the usage statistics, interacting with people who contact you, and writing more content. The design function is so trivial that I'd go without mentioning it at all if I thought I could get away with it!

After the initial investment in time and money of launching the website, every author will have a very different outlook as to how much work to invest in the website going forward. For unpublished authors, I believe the more time you invest in writing new books, which are also new web content, the better the chance you will eventually have a platform that either let you publish and sell your own books or earn you a trade contract. It's not automatic that by writing more you'll get more quality visitors and links. It depends both on your writing and your subjects. There really are authors out there producing minute and detailed descriptions of their day-to-day lives, and while anthropologists of the future may take notice, nobody else does. And, no matter how good and relevant your writing is, it does take some initial effort to get a few links so the search engines will take it seriously.

When I was laid up in the house for a week and spending way too much time online, I did a little research project on what happens to domain names of publishers who go out of business.What I found is that they usually get taken over by spam sites advertising everything from dating services to, putting it mildly, stay-at-home alternatives to dating. Some of these small publishers went out of business and nobody cared anymore what happened to the domain name. In other cases, they simply forgot to renew it, or the business ownership was in transition when the renewal came up and nobody quite got to it. This gave me the idea of trying save publisher domain names as they expired, which in practice, quickly got expensive. On the bright side, I was able to restore the domain name of one well known literary press to the original owner, but other than that, the only thing I got out of it was an education in the auction process. If you're tempted to get a running start in publishing by purchasing an expiring domain name, I'd advise against it. While any existing links that the original owners attracted will continue to bring you visitors, the search engines zero out the authority value of those links when they see the domain transfer through expiration. Also, the people arriving through those links aren't actually looking for you, and in some cases, there may be trademark or other intellectual property issues associated with using the name, even though it's been sold on the open market.

In fact, this may be the logical time to point out that the Internet has a dark underside, and the good guy doesn't always win. I know of business owners who lost control of their domain names to purveyors of products that are illegal, to say the least, and who were unable to regain control. You have to protect your domain registration and password to your web server the same way you protect your bank code. Don't give any password information out to people who call you on the phone, there is no scenario under which somebody legitimate would be calling you to request your password. Legislation hasn't kept up with the Internet age, so some scams are probably even "legal." For example, every I get a letter by first class mail from some Internet registrar (as seller of domain names) located in NY, telling me that my fonerbooks.com domain needs to be renewed, with a simple form to fill out to accomplish it. They aren't my registrar, and I don't need to renew, but if I filled out the form, they would charge the credit card, have my domain transferred to them. Is it illegal? I don't know, but it's certainly unethical.

Designing a successful website, one that is attractive to search engines and serves the visitors they send, doesn't require any tricks. In fact, the more sophisticated the search engines become, the better your author platform will hold up if you don't depend on gimmicks to attract traffic. For authors and publishers just learning how to sell books online, the most overlooked element of website design is choosing the right page title for each and every page. The page title is the HTML title, the one that appears near the top of your page when you view the source code, as in: <TITLE>Artistic Design Website Aesthetics - Search Engine Love Is Blind</TITLE>. If you're unsure what your HTML page title is, view the page in your browser, and the text that appears in the (usually) blue bar at the very top of your screen is the page title. It's critical to choose the right page title because once your page passes the semantic analysis that tells the search engine it's not just a bucket full of key words, the search engine uses the page title to determine what the author is writing about.

Let's say you're and author or publisher of books about gardening and want to market a book online about how to raise cucumber plants. It will likely contain instructions about selecting the best seeds, preparing the ground, planting at the proper time, cultivating the plants, attracting pollinating insects, discouraging pests, and even how to pick the cucumbers at the peak of flavor. If you title the page "Growing Cucumbers," that's what the search engine will believe the page is about, and a phrase it will send you traffic for, all other things being equal. If you title the page, "Digging in the Back Yard" or "Helpful Insects" then that's what the search engine will believe the page is focused on. It's not that the search engine is ignoring the other text on the page, it's just that there are millions of web pages about gardening, insects and eating, so the search engine relies on the title to resolve which of these subjects your page is really about.

Here's where true author platform optimization comes in. You title your page, "How to raise cucumber plants" and make sure that the nouns actually appear in the text, so the search engine doesn't think you're trying to pull a fast one. But don't artificially increase the density of key words on the page. It may be counterproductive in terms of search engine credibility, and you don't want the visitors you do attract to leave in disgust with the writing style. Once your page is crawled by the search engines, you can expect good search engine placement if somebody types in the query "raise cucumber plants." But there may be a problem. What if most people interested in raising cucumber plants type the query "grow cucumber vines," "cucumber gardening" or "how to plant cucumbers?" You increase your odds with a title like, "Growing Cucumbers - A Gardening Guide On How To Plant and Grow Cucumber Vines," but that approach can only go so far. Search engines will downgrade your page if you repeat a word more than once or twice in the title and dilute the value of the individual words in the title as the length grows.

One method to determine how people search on the subject is for the author to ask friends and family how they would go about it, though it's hard coming up with a way to phrase the question that won't influence the answer. Better yet, sit behind them and look over their shoulders when they try. Another method is to make educated guesses and experiment with different page titles every couple of months, monitoring site statistics to determine the results. The irony is that when you figure out a super-attractive key phrase for your material, you can be sure that 100 other sites are using it as well, so your chances of being at the top of the pile are better with a slightly more obscure phrasing.

With the free Google Adwords tool we discussed earlier, you can check key phrases to see how popular they were in searches in Google the previous month. It's a quick heat check that will tell you if people are searching on "Growing Cucumbers" a hundred times a day or ten times a month. If you sign up with Google Adwords for a paid campaign, you'll not only get to test key phrases, but you'll actually be marketing your books right on the search engine's site. You'll probably find that most of the pages on your website can be accurately described by many different key words or phrases. The feedback from your marketing data can go a long way towards revealing the mechanics of how your audience actually thinks about your subject matter. Of course, tracking how your books are selling is the best measure of success for any online publishing effort.

If you have much more information on a web page than you can capture in the page title, it's time to consider dividing it into multiple pages with more focused topics. It works well with search engines, and it works well with readers who are looking for pretty specific information, like how to make pickles, and don't want to read several thousand words about cucumber farming before they get there. When it comes to selling your books through an author platform, a large number of short pages help to give the impression that it's better to buy the book than to visit and print each of the pages in hopes that it will suffice. The best part of breaking a large topic down into component parts on separate pages is that you can learn from your visitor statistics which subjects are the most popular. If you use this strategy with a draft copy or with articles that you're considering for a book, you can use the visitor statistics to help shape the final form of the book. We aren't suggesting you write a whole book based on visitor statistics, that would be like planning family meals around what the kids like the most, and you'd end up with nothing but desserts. However, if you're an author who's publishing for a living, you better pay attention to what the public has a taste for.

Tweaking your ordering links and learning how to get the most out of your online marketing takes patience, but is worth the effort. For example, this page had sales links at the top, left, and bottom when I added this note, but I'll rearrange them in a month or two if I'm not selling books. Sometimes I link directly to Amazon from a page like this, or include my PayPal sales link, it works differently for every title and the only way to get it right is to experiment. If you have more than a hundred people a day coming to your website but feel your're not selling as many booksas you should, drop me a line and I'll take a look.