Are you ready to pick a WordPress theme for your new website and blog? If you’ve been following our Saturday social media for authors blog series and completed the first six “baby steps”, you already have a domain name, webhost, and content management system ready to go. Hopefully you’ve found time over the holidays to do a bit of window shopping and figured out how you want your new site to look. For baby step seven, you want to keep that general aesthetic in mind. If you haven’t yet completed all the previous steps, don’t fret. Even if you haven’t installed WordPress.org through the control panel at your webhost, you can still look around and see what you want for YOUR site in 2012. Go to WordPress.org, search through their free themes, and take a demo before you decide. Here are the 5 themes we recommend for a professional author’s website and blog: 1. Delicate. This theme is simple, clean, and customizable. It’s a good alternative to Atahualpa, which is a very basic theme for authors who don’t want to spend much time on widgets and other flashy web gadgets. Delicate is a beautiful way to start. 2. Coraline. Popular, elegant, and easily managed. It is a hybrid between the Magazine Theme and the basic Twenty Eleven (either of these would also work for an author, too). 3. Matisse. This theme is a bit more fun and colorful, but with core customization options every author needs like a custom header, custom menus, theme…

When you are building your author website from the ground up and trying to keep expenses low, it helps to have a friend who knows a thing or two about website design and development. You know, that friend you have that helps you out in a pinch and who can show you the ropes? Who asks only for your friendship – and maybe a free coffee – in return? Swenson Book Development, LLC is that friend. Today, writer friends, I give you my tricks of the trade. My freebies. My tool kit. If you implement these tools appropriately, you can jazz up your website with all the latest bells and whistles like those best-selling NYT / Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 authors we all love to hate (and hate to love – damn, the writing is good!). I’ve gathered these goodies up over the past few months to present a small guide to tricking out your ride, frosting your lady, and generally decking the ball hall that is your shiny, new author website. Tool #1: Free social media icon sets Want to encourage readers to share your blog posts? What better way to encourage a bit of free self-promotion than with snazzy social media icons? These articles have collected eye-catching, elegant and hands-down bad-ass icon sets, and now I share them with you: Elegantics.com: MG and children’s writers will have fun with the Hand Drawn and Magic Marker sets, while the artistically-inclined will feel inspired by the  Splattered and the Picasso sets. My…

Keeping Up With the Joneses in the Design and Development of Your New Website and Blog Over the last three Saturdays, we have outlined preliminary steps for building an author website and blog. Today we talk about design. But before picking out tiles and swatches for your new electronic home, look at your neighbors’ houses. Do some window shopping. Compare yourself to the Joneses by scouting out other authors’ websites. And get to know your author-neighbors. First, make a list of the authors who have written books in your subject area or genre. Add to this list some authors whose work you enjoy. Then search online for their websites and click through every page. Look; read; browse. Pay attention to where your eyes wander.  Each author has a unique style, voice and signature as part of her or his “brand.” What do you like about particular sites? And just as important, what don’t you like about certain websites? What features or design elements would you like to appear in yours?  Take notes so that when you search in WordPress for a “theme” or template, you will have an idea of how you want your pages to look. As you study the websites and blogs of authors, keep track of URLs for their websites and links to the author’s Facebook Page, Twitter, and other social media platforms. Notice not only where they are located on a page, but which platforms are used. This market research isn’t just an opportunity to window…