Website vs Blogsite

Yes.


Of course, the real caveat is what you hope to accomplish with your blog. Also, you could design your own site. Depending on your geek level, it could be possible, if time consuming. Also, would you host your blog on your own domain or with a site such as wordpress or blogspot? What kind of template would you use? What kind of marketing do you plan on doing? What are your publishing credentials?

These are not questions you need to answer to us - it's more to get you thinking about what it is that you expect a blog to accomplish for you.

Another question is how much you think it's going to cost. If you design your own, then costs are limited to domain registration once a year (about $8 or 9) plus domain hosting (say, $3-10, depending on features you get), so costs can be fairly low. Templates, depending on what you're using for either a CMS (content management system) or for the blog can be free and you can customize, and a lot of software can also be had for free. But it also depends on what you want out of the software and what your expectations are.

Personally, I'm all for doing things on the cheap and, other than domain hosting and domain registration, I pay nothing. OTOH, I also have a geek husband who helps out, plus I'm fairly geeky in my own way.

Some web hosting services have free templates that you can use to get started. The downside of this is that your site may look like a gazillion other sites out there. On that infamous other hand, these templates are designed by professionals.

I'm with quidscribs - what do you want to accomplish? If you want to post cover art and excerpts from your books, you can do this in blog entries and place the links on your home page template.

The cool thing about most templates is that they're designed to look professional from the start. But stay away from Flash-based templates. They're easy to use, but make your site virtually invisible to the search engines.

von62653 said:

My web-host also has templates - I'll have to check them out again.

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You can also do a search online for free web templates to download and tons of stuff should come up. Even if you just look at what's out there to get ideas it could be useful.

I would love to have my own website to show case my writing but I just can't justify the cost at the moment so my blog suffices.

You should also know here are pitfalls to using FrontPage. Yes, I understand it's easier to use than other web design programs, but it also tends to produce bloated code that takes longer to load.

I used to use FP. One page reduced in size to 1/3 when I switched to another program - Dreamweaver - and removed all the FrontPage code that was no longer necessary to go with their themes. That's a huge amount of bloat.

Remember, not everyone has high speed internet. Many people in the US, never mind the rest of the world, still use dial up, so bloated code will be more painful for them to load the page.

Also avoid heavy graphics - slows the load time - and using lots of different fonts, lots of colors, flashing text, and all that goofy stuff that really belongs on a personal page where it won't matter.


Installing a blog such as WordPress on your own domain is actually pretty easy. I've done it. They also have a variety of templates you can use - free - and customize to your liking. I've done that, too. You can also add static pages (ie, not blog pages but pages that are not date dependant).

Going that way might be a good choice. But seriously, depends on what you want to do.

quidscribis said:

Installing a blog such as WordPress on your own domain is actually pretty easy. I've done it. They also have a variety of templates you can use - free - and customize to your liking. I've done that, too.

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This is what I've done also. I bought my domain and pay for hosting, but WP (and its various plugins/templates/etc) are free.

I used to showcase my freelance work on the site (before I installed the blog), and that made showing off my clips & credentials really easy. Then again, the static site didn't get nearly as much traffic as my blog currently does...

Simon Haynes is a member on here, a published author who also writes software. He has software for setting up web pages called yGen which you can find here http://www.spacejock.com/

I have read his first Hal Spacejock novel, it's funny enough to get me going to buy the second.

Hey, I got you beat, Doc. I've read both first and second. Definitely enjoyable.

I second what quidscribs said about Front Page. The code is very bloated. I've been using MS Visual Web Developer lately. Of course, I do web programming, but this tool is free, and the files don't bloat up like Front Page. But it's not as easy to use. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're deeply into web design and hooking up databases and the like to your pages. There are some good, free web tools out there as well.

I suggest that you look into a hosting service that offers blog software and free templates. You should be able to get all that for under US$10 a month.

Go ahead and learn basic HTML. It's not that hard; generally you only need to learn around ten tags. Really.

I teach freshman comp students enough html in ninety minutes to build a simple Web page and take care of their own blog.

Nvu is a decent free editor from Mozilla; it's available for multiple platforms.

http://www.nvu.com/

There are others as well.

You can also use any text editor that saves as ASCII or plaint text, even the one that's built in to Windows.


Front Page is Eeeeeviillll. Don't turn towards the dark . . .

The secret to a good layout is in using CSS, a way of organizing HTML tags and sections of a page so you really can do decent layouts.

Here's a good tutorial on CSS:

http://www.wise-women.org/studygroups/

CSS lets you assign style and postion information to HTML tags. You can, for instance, declare in a style sheet that every p tag of class maintext is in Georgia, black text, medium size. So all you have to is use p class=maintext, and all the text will be automatically Georgia, black text, medium size.

That's just the most basic example. You can do a lot more, like create "boxes," visible and invisible, using div tags.

quidscribis said:

Hey, I got you beat, Doc. I've read both first and second. Definitely enjoyable.

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OK, if you've read both of Simon's, now it's time to read mine.

I finished a major edit on the next book yesterday, tomorrow it's time to get that query letter out. Wish me luck.

I coded my own site, but I don't think anyone is going to be turned off if you use something like Blogspot. A blogspot blog looks pretty similar to any other blog -- and you are able to do some decent customization of it if you know what you are doing. (They also have different templates to pick from and they allow google adsense if you want to put ads on it.)

I don't use blogspot, but I did create a quick blog on it just to see what it was like 'behind the scenes' and it looked pretty easy to use.