The Written Word Is Worth A Thousand Pictures

Artistic Design And Domain Names

The well known architectural principle of "form follows function" is even better suited to websites than to buildings. The most beautiful website I've ever spent time exploring belongs to a well founded NYC based literary publisher. The graphics are stunning, the presentation is classy, and I'm sure every author with a book in their catalog has sent friends and family to view their bio page.The navigation is excellent, and the content is comprehensive in describing the mission and offerings of the press. They did so many things right that I have no doubt it required great effort and expense. The site is also invisible to search engines for all searches except the publisher name, which is fortunately the same as the domain name, or they would have been dependent on the kindness of strangers for proper linking to appear in the results. If it was your site, as an author, I can pretty much guarantee you that nobody would ever come. Invisible.

It's all wrong from the perspective of building a platform based on Internet search, because the site was constructed entirely in Flash, a rich multimedia presentation software that gives the designer total artistic control over the presentation. That control comes at a steep cost. In this case, all of the "text" on the site, the book descriptions, the company history, the author bios, even the navigation links, exist as images or as programming instructions, not as regular text. The result is that the search engines can't see any of the content on the site, or rather, they can't interpret what it's all about. I suspect this was more of an ommision than a design goal with the publisher, and assuming that Internet visibility isn't a core part of their business strategy, it's not hurting them badly. While the only visitors the site will get will be people who set out to go there, they'll get a good show when they arrive. Unless, of course, they don't have the latest version of Flash installed. In that case, they'll just see a message telling them to please download and install the latest version of Flash, it will only take a minute on a fast connection. It is possible to provide alternative text for search engines when using Flash, but the designers didn't bother, and in any case the search engines don't take it as gospel because it could all be a lie.

If somebody is funding you with millions of dollars to become an author, you can start by building a museum quality website if that's your fancy. If you're building you first website as an author, unpublished or published, aesthetics are an expensive luxury. When I say expensive, I'm refering to time more than to money. I've been a pied piper of establishing a web presence for years now, an essay I wrote describing the Internet as "The Path to Publication in the 21st Century" was even published in couple editions of Jeff Herman's guide to publishers, editors and agents ,back around the turn of the millenia. So I've personally coached, and tried coaching, many writers and small businessmen through the process of establishing a web platform. It's a good thing I never charged for the service because my failure rate was embarrassingly high, it and always came down to the same thing. Authors who have never published before, in particular, have this insane fear of making fools of themselves, when the insurmountable obstacle for most is finding somebody who is willing to pay attention long enough to laugh. Worrying about getting everything on your website just perfect before finding out whether or not anybody will ever come is plain dumb.

In the spirit of the fanaticism that's part and parcel with promoting a cause, I want to make clear that there's no room for compromise on the artistic issue! I've seen the endless pre-launch dithering sidetrack and destroy an author's chances of building web platform again and again. So while not exactly a compromise, I've come up with a two step plan for launching a website that will maximize the author's chance of success in actually creating a platform of value while allowing for aesthetics to play a role. I could break it into many more steps to reduce the complexity of the tasks, but I think the two step method is more likely to keep the author on the straight and narrow.

Step 1. Read the rest of this book to learn how to organize and present a text based website, knock it out in simple two column format, links to the left, content to the right, and put it on the web, or pay a college kid some beer money to put it on the web for you. Then spend all the effort you can stomach getting links to the site, without which it's all a waste of time.

Step. 2. When you're getting a couple hundred visitors a day from the search engines, do whatever the hell you want with the artistic look, just don't change any of the page names, or remove any of the text.

The right domain name can help you establish a theme for your website and will contribute a little to the search visibility of your site for the words in the name, but for authors, it's not worth breaking open your wallet over. Many famous authors use their name for the domain name if they are able to get it. For an unknown author who nobody is searching for, it's not going to help and may even hurt in the short term if it's hard to spell. If I could have it over again, I would have gone with a different domain name form my www.fonerbooks.com site simply because nobody knows how to spell "foner." When you're having a conversation with somebody, whether in person or over the phone, and they ask for your website address, it's better if they can guess the spelling without asking. But it's not worth getting your heart set on some name that somebody else has taken and paying them for it or putting your plans on hold because you can't get it. Of all the elements involved is designing an author platform, the domain dame is the least important.

If you work primarily in one area, an easy to remember ".com" domain name incorporating some key words from your specialty is a reasonable way to go. Despite all of the speculation on domain names, by being a little flexible, you can always find one that encompasses the theme you want without getting ridiculously long to do it. Lets say you work in the competitive field of romance novels. You'd think all the good names are already taken, but while you're obviously late to the party to get www.romancenovels.com (first registered in 1996), www.romancenovelsdiva.com was available when I just checked. So were www.romancenovelsauthor.com (which surprised me), and the singular, www.romancenovelauthor.com. Clearly, even if these had been taken, there would be plenty of alternatives available, like www.romanceauthorsusan.com for authors named Susan. All of these are easy enough to spell and contain a couple key words for which you'd like to enhance your search visibility. As long as we're on the topic, I still recommend the original domain name registrar for the United States, www.networksolutions.com, even though they are far from the cheapest. They answer their phones if you have a problem, they aren't going to go out of business, and at around $15/year if you pay for several years in advance, it's not that big a deal.

When I was laid up in the house for a week and spending way too much time online, I did a little research project on what happens to domain names of publishers who go out of business.What I found is that they usually get taken over by spam sites advertising everything from dating services to, putting it mildly, stay-at-home alternatives to dating. Some of these small publishers went out of business and nobody cared anymore what happened to the domain name. In other cases, they simply forgot to renew it, or the business ownership was in transition when the renewal came up and nobody quite got to it. This gave me the idea of trying save publisher domain names as they expired, which in practice, quickly got expensive. On the bright side, I was able to restore the domain name of one well known literary press to the original owner, but other than that, the only thing I got out of it was an education in the auction process. If you're tempted to get a running start in publishing by purchasing an expiring domain name, I'd advise against it. While any existing links that the original owners attracted will continue to bring you visitors, the search engines zero out the authority value of those links when they see the domain transfer through expiration. Also, the people arriving through those links aren't actually looking for you, and in some cases, there may be trademark or other intellectual property issues associated with using the name, even though it's been sold on the open market.

In fact, this may be the logical time to point out that the Internet has a dark underside, and the good guy doesn't always win. I know of business owners who lost control of their domain names to purveyors of products that are illegal, to say the least, and who were unable to regain control. You have to protect your domain registration and password to your web server the same way you protect your bank code. Don't give any password information out to people who call you on the phone, there is no scenario under which somebody legitimate would be calling you to request your password. Legislation hasn't kept up with the Internet age, so some scams are probably even "legal." For example, every I get a letter by first class mail from some Internet registrar (as seller of domain names) located in NY, telling me that my fonerbooks.com domain needs to be renewed, with a simple form to fill out to accomplish it. They aren't my registrar, and I don't need to renew, but if I filled out the form, they would charge the credit card, have my domain transferred to them. Is it illegal? I don't know, but it's certainly unethical.