I Built A Website!

Though I am an art technician, digital technology is not my strongest point. You know where you stand with analog. Something’s broken, you just pull it apart, fix it and put it back together again. Voila! Sadly, digital is not so straightforward. So, when I realised it was time to build an Author Website, I worried I was a little out of my depth.

I got some advice from the lovely Best Seller Experiment podcast facebook group and while following that, I found Simon from Metic Media on YouTube. He has made a simple video that states the pros and cons of several web builders and made choosing the right one for me easy.

Here is the link to that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pvi_metetxk&t=601s

Once I chose Squarespace, I thought I would dive right in. These websites are user friendly, right? I can totally do this, right?

Wrong!

After about 2 hours of messing up all the settings and creating a digi-mess in cyberspace, I thought I would go back to Simon on YouTube and see if he had any help. He did!

The Squarespace video is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmQTck7bqsk

What I liked most about the video is that the chap Simon didn’t assume I have ANY KNOWLEDGE, so he spoke through it all in a way I understood. Once I’d got the basics down, I started building. Googling for any additional tweaks that were proving difficult and looking at some of my favourite YA author’s websites for inspiration, I built a website that looked like this:

Hurray! It’s a website. Unfortunately, I appear to have created it for my exceptionally sensible twin, who doesn’t actually exist, let alone need a website. So I had a think about how to represent myself and my work best. I had to tweak some settings YouTube chappy Simon said to leave, but I was starting to feel cocky and I’ve never really been one to stick to rules anyway. So, I reworked the webpage until it looked like this:

Hurray! My website now reflects my erratic energy, love for colour and has everything I think I need to get started on newslettering, blogging and sharing news about my work.

Now I have, like Victor Frankenstein, made my creation live. I’m seriously hoping things turn out better for my website than for poor Adam in Mary Shelley’s masterpiece. AND…with Metics Media on YouTube there is a code below the video for 10% off with Squarespace.

(NOTE: I am in NO WAY sponsored by YouTube or Metics Media… just super grateful to have found useful help online.)

If I can build a website, anyone can. I love that I can keep changing it, adding, taking away and making it fit for purpose to suit my needs, styles and tastes.

Hope that helps! If you don’t want to miss out on any of my future blog posts or news, please sign up to my newsletter on my shiny new website: www.poppytperry.com

Wishing you all exciting things as you carve out your own bit of space on the vast expanse that is the world wide web.

Poppy x