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Building your author website is a big project that requires professional knowledge of industry-wide best practices. Avoid these common mistakes to make sure your website can compete with the best.

1. Having your friend build your author website for free

It may sound great to have a friend build your author website for free—and once in a while it can actually work out.

But like all free things in life, it doesn’t come without its own set of unique headaches and hurdles you’ll have to face sooner rather than later.

That’s because your friend or family member likely thought they were doing this great favor for you that would be a one and done good deed—without you or them realizing the hours upon hours of ongoing maintenance and updates you’ll need them to make on your site every year.

And if they didn’t build the site in a way that’s easy for you to update on your own—like adding a new page, updating copy, or refreshing your layout—you’re stuck looking for a developer willing to learn and edit website they didn’t build to make updates, or hiring a new designer to build you a better site from scratch.

Furthermore, all websites are not created equally. You may technically have an author website that was built for free, but do you know if it’s optimized for search engines (SEO)? 

Is it a one-page site that will be difficult to bring in organic traffic because it doesn’t have any other pages? 

Is your website optimized for mobile and tablet screens, which make up over 50% of all website traffic? 

Are your website colors, fonts, and heading tags set up for accessibility access?

These are just a few of the most common issues you’ll likely run into having a friend build your author website for free.

2. Building an overly customized author website on Wordpress

It’s one thing if you have a vision and a serious budget for a super customized website built by strong developers and designers on Wordpress.

However—the majority of authors do not need an overly customized or complicated author website that is difficult to manage and update on their own.

The issues with Wordpress are that it’s an extremely old platform in terms of internet years and requires a mountain of third-party plugins to make your author website look modern and attractive. 

Managing the updates for these third-party plugins can be a serious nightmare, as many of them can stop working without notice, leaving your website looking like a mess or completely non-functional. 

Additionally, many Wordpress templates are quite outdated and not in line with modern web design standards.

I’ve heard so many stories from authors complaining about how difficult it is to manage their Wordpress websites due to how complicated it can be to make simple updates and having to rely on—and pay—their developer to make these updates for them.

3. Ignoring established web design standards for accessibility

Ignoring web design standards for accessibility is more of an issue when authors without extensive web design knowledge try to DIY a site themselves. 

Things like color contrast between a background color and the color of the text are vitally important for readability and accessibility, and may not be something an amateur designer has ever considered.

Adobe has a really cool Color Contrast Analyzer that lets you enter your background colors and text colors to help you determine if there’s enough contrast between the colors to be easily readable.

They also have a Color Blind Safe tool to check to see if your colors have any conflicts for folks with color blindness. 

In terms of fonts, your website should at most have three fonts used regularly throughout its web pages. 

Headings typically have one font, paragraphs use another font, and sometimes button text or miscellaneous fine print use a third font. 

You’ll also want to make sure all the text on your website is easily readable in terms of size. 

4. Using images that are too small, too big, or low quality

Having the right image file sizes are very important for website speed. If your images are too small, they will likely appear pixelated and unprofessional.

Conversely, if your image files are too big they will likely cause your site to load very slowly.

Site speed is important because many web users will abandon a website that takes too long to load. That equates to losing out on organic traffic, new readers, and potential new customers. 

Make sure your photo files are no larger than 1MB to be on the safe side.

5. Being afraid of standard digital marketing best practices

This is a big one I’ve heard from authors over the years: I don’t want to come off as promoting myself too much. 

While I understand the emotion behind this on a personal level, it’s not a good strategy to be scared of what imaginary people will think of the very common digital marketing tools you should have implemented on your author website. 

Things like creating a newsletter so you can capture email addresses and grow your mailing list are an essential part of growing any small business or startup—which is exactly what you are as an author launching your platform. 

As annoying as they might be, pop-ups are a time-tested, extremely useful marketing tool that will help you grow your mailing list and reader base faster. 

Thinking you have a big enough reader base because of social media followers is not enough in today’s world. One update to the algorithm on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter can mean you lose reaching your audience because you don’t have their contact information outside of these social media platforms. 

As difficult as it may be, it’s really important to switch from “artist” mode to “business” mode when navigating your digital marketing efforts on your author website. 

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