I Made a Kick-Ass New Website!!! (and Here’s Why!)

(I mean, a kick-ass new website besides this one, of course ;-)

ianmrogersauthor.com has been online for a few weeks, first in a “Coming Soon!” capacity, but more recently in more substantial form as I added pages and links.  I’m really happy with how it’s come out, people seem to like it, and I can always go back and makes changes later.

I wanted the new author website to have a cleaner, sleeker feel than But I Also Have a Day Job (which I intentionally designed to look like a blog from the late 2000s) and be easier to navigate, ESPECIALLY on a phone.  The plan is to keep the new website as a separate entity from BIAHADJ (which I assure you isn’t going anywhere!) as a way of highlighting both MFA Thesis Novel and my editing work (which I’m doing more of now!).

When people who don’t know me look me up, I’d like the new website to make a better first impression and be a bit cleaner around the edges while still retaining my intentional overuse of words like “awesome” and “totally.”

I also wrote a short humor piece especially for the website: Imaginary Hate Mail I’ve Received About MFA Thesis Novel.  I wanted a fun, absurd piece that was a spin-off of the novel and would give visitors an idea of what my writing looks like.  It’s an awesome piece that you should totally check out right now, even if you weren’t planning on checking out the rest of the website.

I’ve moved some other stuff over to the new site as well, including my Other Writing page (which was sadly in need of an update!) and my About Me page (which includes my super-nice author photo that Kaede Tsuji took back in Toyama).  I’ve tried to link the two sites in a way that feels organic and easy to navigate, though I still might toy with this a bit.

You can check out the new site (all comments welcome!) or read on for thoughts on why I made it and what I hope for the future.

 

I Built But I Also Have a Day Job to Fit a Specific Role

Waaaaaaaaay back in 2016 when I started this blog, I didn’t have a novel out, or even a chapbook—I had a few scattered publications around the net, but that was all.  As such, it didn’t seem worthwhile to make a whole author website when I didn’t have any bigger publications.

In thinking about my plans, I’d noticed a few other writers who, like me, also didn’t have a book out yet but had lonely-looking author websites without a lot of info on them.  Making a simple author website that was basically a “I’m going to write some awesome stuff soon—I promise!!!!” page didn’t seem like a productive use of my time or money, and didn’t seem like it would do much to help my credibility.  So I put the personal website idea aside.

I also noticed a lot of writer websites that had blogs about…nothing in particular?  As in, if the writer had a blog on their site, it was basically a dumping ground for random thoughts, and didn’t get updated very often.  Those weren’t the kind of blogs I wanted to read, and keeping one on a super-small website also didn’t seem like a good use of my time or money.

What did seem like a good use of my time and money, though, was making a content-oriented website about a topic people would want to read about—in this case, the practical aspects of creative work.  I could design it as a blog and update it regularly, which would be a good, easy way to get more of my writing out into the world and develop my web presence.  People would come back to a blog that was updated regularly, had interesting stuff on it, and was funny and easy to read.

In the meantime, I also wanted to have some sort of web presence I could point people to, whether it was in an online author bio or on a business card. The new site could have an About Me page, contact info, and give a general impression of what kind of emerging creative person I was.

But I Also Have a Day Job emerged as a natural solution to my situation in 2016: an actual, theme-oriented website that people would want to come back to that could also give me a basic web presence.  It was exactly, 100% the website I needed back then.

 

Author Websites With Your Name in the Domain Are Basically a Thing

Meanwhile, fast-forward to 2022 when I have a novel to promote, more of a web presence, and more actual author info to share with people I meet or who see my book title at a brick-and-mortar store.  A lot of this information felt like it was getting lost on But I Also Have a Day Job, the vast majority of which consists of blog posts and category menus about creative-work-life balance.  Plus, when viewing the site on a phone, my name shows up waaaaaaaaaay at the bottom—hardly a good way for people to remember the guy behind the blog.

Also, literally ALL of the author marketing info I’ve read, watched, and listened to over the last two years (for instance, here and here) recommends that authors have a simple website: YOURNAME.com.  This is standard in the industry for everyone from Stephen King to Bret Easton Ellis because it’s clear, easy to remember, and helps with SEO.  Also, internet culture has reached a point where NOT having a YOURNAME.com website for author stuff feels unprofessional, or like you’re not really serious.

I’d also started seeing a LOT of author websites (for example, indie author, publisher, and editor M. Allen Cunningham) that highlight both the author’s books and their editing/writing coaching businesses. And—gasp!—I have an emerging editing/writing coaching business too!  So making a new website where the editing section would look really professional seemed like a good idea.

After I signed MFA Thesis Novel, I knew I had to (eventually) rework my online presence with an author website—but how, exactly?  And when????? (Don’t forget, I’ve been really, really busy the last two years…)  I thought about revamping BIAHADJ somehow to focus more on me as an author with a cool-sounding domain (similar to what Cory Doctorow does with his site, craphound.com), but this didn’t seem like enough of a step, and one that would still cause problems with SEO.

Creating a separate author website just seemed like the smart decision—the only problem was finding the time to make it.  As the novel publication date drew near I bought a domain name, ianmrogersauthor.com, because ianmrogers.com was already taken (!!!!!) and adding “author” seemed like a smart step rather than adding hyphens or a .net address.  (Remember that I decided to use the M to differentiate myself from the other Ian Rogers who’s a writer!). I chose the domain in November when I was preparing the front cover text for MFA Thesis Novel for the publisher, which meant that I could have the new web address appear in the novel to point readers in the right direction.

I set the new domain up with Bluehost (my webhost) and was easily able to add a redirect to But I Also Have a Day Job, so if anyone found the website address they’d simply get pointed here.

 

Building and Designing

Before 2016 I had a bit of experience with WordPress from my job as a school secretary, and I designed But I Also Have a Day Job after a lot of trial, error, and web searching to find out how to do the web coding I needed.  A big part of the challenge with this site was arranging the posts the way I wanted them, maintaining a separate, now-defunct blog for book reviews, and choosing the black-and-white old-timey photo theme, which took some brainstorming.  I found a theme I liked (WP Forge), then created a WP child theme with simple coding additions and a bit of CSS.  It’s not the cleanest site in the world, coding-wise, but it gets the job done.

For ianmrogers.com I wanted a different, more 2022 design that would look great on a phone and be relatively minimalist.  I have a pretty sub-par eye for design, but I had no interest in hiring a web designer (no money in budget/wanted to improve my own skills/would take time to find one I trusted).  As a result, I tried out a TON of different themes, layouts, and designs before I found a simple one I liked called Minaz that I could set up with a menu, basic pages, and a no-frills header.  This time, rather than make a child theme with HTML mods, I was able to get the effects I wanted using only plugins and WordPress customization, which allowed me to make a cleaner site overall.

Once I had the theme, I played with a lot of layout options, fonts, spacing, and sizes before I found something that looked good on desktop and mobile (again, phones were a priority!).  After that, I took a separate day to pull out a notebook and draft out the copy for the main page, the MFA Thesis Novel page, my Editing page, and the About Me page.  I wrote the Imaginary Hate Mail page separately after I had the idea a few months ago, and just gave it a polish before putting it online.

Finally, building the actual pages was a bit of a learning curve—after all, I hadn’t built a website in six years, and this one was really different than my last one!  Luckily, the WordPress Gutenberg editor is AWESOME and super-powerful: it didn’t exist in 2016 when I made BIAHADJ, and using it allowed me more options and easy ways of seeing what the pages looked like on desktop and mobile right away.  It’s not quite a drag-and-drop editor like Weebly or Squarespace, but it’s pretty damned close, and it’s significantly cheaper.

Plus, I needed to brush up on my design skills anyway ;-)

 

Final Steps

After the site went live, I sent it to a few close friends and members of my writing group to gauge their opinions (thanks Joe, Mike, Stu, and Piper!), and made a few tweaks.  After that, I went back into BIAHADJ and rearranged the elements a bit to avoid redundancy and point readers to the new site—you might have noticed the new Author Site tab, as well as a few other changes to the top menu!

Last of all was making this post, which I consider the new site’s real unveiling.  Like I said, I don’t expect the new site to be something that people keep coming back to, since I really want it to be for people who find me online and don’t already know me.  I still want to keep the Day Job blog running strong, both as a behind-the-scenes look into my writing life, and with more insights, guest posts, and interviews about the creative work-life balance that I can eventually spin off as a separate project—but that’s still a ways away.

In any case, I hope you like the new site, and it feels good to be moving onwards and upwards, even in this very small way.

 

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