About a month ago, agent Nathan Bransford hosted a blog entry contest. One of the winners was Jordan McCollum, who wrote a great post on essential components of an aspiring writer's website.
This week she's starting an author website critique series on her own blog, and my site was the first in line! She and internet designer Kathleen MacIver gave some really insightful and practical tips that are not only helpful to me, but would be useful to any writer looking to improve their web presence. Go check it out!
Since this review has put me in a "website improvement" mood, I figure it's good time to solicit feedback from you, my readers. Now that I've put up a few entries, do you have any comments or suggestions for improvement? Anything that you'd like to see more or less of? If you read Jordan's review, I'd love to hear whether or not you agree with her suggestions as well.
A week from Saturday I'm getting married (!!!!), and then I'll be gone for two weeks on my honeymoon in the Canadian Rockies. See you all when I return!
Congratulations on your wedding!
ReplyDeleteMy only request for improvement would be to use a larger font or font-size. I need to enlarge my screen to read your tiny writing.
Done. Hope that helps!
ReplyDeleteCongrats!
ReplyDeletehey, where can I get the code for the little tweet thing at the start of the post?
I don't quite remember exactly where I got the retweet button, but if you google "blogger retweet button", you get whole bunches of pages with tutorials.
ReplyDeleteThe larger text is wonderful! I don't feel cross-eyed any more.
ReplyDeleteThanks!
I stumbled upon here randomly (your blog interests me, so I hope you don't mind I've linked you to my own site so I can follow more easily) - thanks for linking to Nathan/ Jordan (I made some changes to my own blog to reflect advice given).
ReplyDeleteImprovement suggestion: blog more. I know between grad school, real life, and actually writing, you'll be quite busy, but the more posts you have, the more things readers will see/comment/follow... Other than that, I feel you have a pretty nice setup already. :)
Congrats on your wedding!
Very cool! How did she hear about you?
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I would also agree that her comments are solid. Blogging more works (but maybe that'll wait until AFTER the wedding, ha). Maybe giving more updates on how your own writing is going or helpful comments from your writing group would generate easy content. Photos/illustrations also help (even the cover of the book you're reviewing).
As a visual person, modifying your template or at least having a custom header (as Katie suggested) would make your site tailored. If you want help with designing...let me know! (Could be my wedding present to you ;) )
Anyways, happy rest of planning!
Livia signed up when I put out a call for volunteers. I like the larger font size, too—easy to read.
ReplyDeleteThe Tweet button looks like TweetMeme to me.
Hope you to see many of you around!