About
What we do
Website design — and redesign! — including:
- blogs
- forums
- photo galleries
- contests
- mailing lists
- visitor statistics
- search engine optimization
- central control panel for quick access to accounts
All of our designs are standards-compliant, CSS-based, accessible, and search engine friendly. Whenever possible, we include blogs or basic content management systems in our redesign plans. It’s important to us to make it easy for authors to update their own sites.
Reputation monitoring
- email or RSS notifications of book reviews and mentions in blogs
Event promotion
- promoting appearances online
- RSVPs
In addition to the usual web design services, we’re throwing in some extras: helping authors stay on top of reader discussions and finding ways to promote their appearances online. There are lots of free web tools that let people do these things, but we don’t see many authors taking advantage of them. Our motivation is entirely selfish: as readers, we wish it were easier to keep up with our favorite authors.
Domains and Hosting
We do not host sites ourselves. We think there are plenty of great, cheap web hosts that do it way better than we could. We also believe it’s important for authors to retain ownership of their sites and domains; we’ve seen some strange situations arise when someone else — be it the designer, the publisher, or a fan — owns everything. We will help set up accounts, but we’ll never put them in our name or hold someone’s data hostage.
Free Advice
We’ll post a lot of tips for authors who prefer to develop their own sites. Once a week1 we’ll also post a new entry in our series, 50 ways your website is not helping you sell more novels. Alas, each entry in this series is based on a true story.
We’ll also evaluate existing sites. We’ll look at the underlying code as well as the graphic design and see if the site is efficient, effective, and user friendly — and if not, we’ll suggest ways to improve it.
Why we do it
We are all avid readers and web surfers. We have seen good sites and bad sites. We have watched as time passed sites by. We’ve seen authors struggle with what to put on their sites, how to build them, and where to host them.
We have seen a lot of authors pay too much money for bad websites.
We want to bring affordable, well designed and manageable websites to authors.
Who we are
Stephanie Leary
Steph has worked as a web designer for various parts of the Texas A&M University System for a few years now, and has recently moved to the University Writing Center. She spends a large chunk of her day pestering her colleagues about CSS and accessible design. In her copious spare time, she’s writing her first fourteen novels simultaneously. For a laugh, ask her how that’s going.
Sarah Schroeder Stanley
Sarah can’t decide on what her last name should be, and enjoys learning new and spiffy things about web design. Sarah’s a Pro member of RWA.
1 At the moment, we’re up to #35 and we’re taking a break. We’ll resume the series soon.
