What Every Writer Should Have…

December 23rd, 2004 · No Comments
by Jill Monroe

After that first initial barrage of questions I received after getting “The Call” I was asked about a website. Okay, talk about panic. What’s a gal with little money, and even less amounts of website creativity to do?The first thing I did was use the free resources at my disposal. Since I use cox for e-mail, one of the benefits is free web space. Okay, first hurdle down. Secondly, where to get it? Godaddy.com was the logical choice, came highly recommended, inexpensive and easy to use. But there was a problem…JillMonroe.com was already taken, so after a quick discussion with my friends, JillMonroebooks.com was purchased (the books part being my optimistic side).

My extensive google searches on my name shows a porn star with the same name…I often wonder if some of my traffic is coming from her.

So next step: getting the website up and running. After a quick google search, I found several tutorials. I chose http://www.thesitewizard.com – not only did it explain everything perfectly, it even told me how to do it for free using Mozilla – even better because that fit my budget so very well. In less than an evening, I had a basic website created and published to cox. Later, with the help of my friend Kelli McBride – I had a background.

My background and navigation buttons are supposed to be reminiscent of fire (I’ll let you figure out why).

I’ve had some experience with html (from when I sold stuff on eBay – and which is why it was so frustrating NOT to be able to get the links working on Booksquare). I was really proud I had a website up and ready to go in one night – and for about 15 bucks. Soon, my husband got into the act designing my fire buttons and banner. He also hates the picture of himself on my bio page (I also noticed the caption I had beside it is gone. Hmmm – I see I need to fix that.)

A lot of my fellow authors develop their own logo and outsource their websites – and they look fantastic! As I’m experiencing, maintaining my own site is time-consuming, and takes away from the time I could be writing. But for now I’m happy – the site I created reflects my personality (most people say the pictures pages is their favorite) and it was something my husband and I did together.

File Under: Jill's First Blog