Build Your Author Platform. Carole Jelen

will be available for your use. Click Activate to turn it on.

      You can read more about WordPress themes in Chapter 2.

Add Social Buttons

      The new rules of website creation demand interactivity. You will be left behind if you don’t include social media buttons and use them to your advantage. These include the Facebook Like button, Twitter share button, the Google+ share button, and the LinkedIn profile button. Ideally, these buttons will appear on all the pages of your website—and in the case of Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ will be easily clickable on every post you write; your readers are far more likely to share your content through social media platforms if you make it easy for them.

      Some themes incorporate social buttons like this or will require you to download and install such WordPress plugins as Social. Let’s walk through installing Social, which connects your WordPress site with your Twitter and Facebook accounts.

      To install Social from the Add New plugin page, type social in the search box. This is a popular keyword, so you’ll see a lot of listings, but you’ll see this plugin at or near the top. Click Install Now. WordPress will download Social and install its files in the appropriate location. WordPress will then ask you to activate the plugin to turn it on. That’s it!

Build Your Audience Through a Regular Newsletter

      One of your primary goals should be to turn your site’s visitors into your readers, and readers into fans. One of the better ways of cementing that writer-reader relationship is to correspond with them regularly. Your website should allow visitors to sign up for a newsletter to learn more about you and your activities. This chore has become a lot easier with the rise of mass email providers that don’t deliver piles of spam into every available email box. Instead, after taking a reader’s email address and later giving them a way to back out, you can deliver solid information about your writing, your events, and whatever else interests you.

      Several companies offer mass email services, but we’ve gotten very comfortable with MailChimp. Besides allowing you to maintain a list of up to 2,000 subscribers at no charge, they offer simple integration with your WordPress site.

      Signing up for a MailChimp account is pretty straightforward. Go to mailchimp.com and click the Sign Up Free button. Give them an email address, a user name, and a password. After you sign up, MailChimp will email you a confirmation link at the address you gave them. You then get to prove you’re not a spambot by entering a batch of stylized letters. Then log in with your username and password.

      When you’ve set up your account, go to your website and pick up the free MailChimp for WP plugin by Danny van Kooten. This plugin creates a Subscribe form on your site and allows you to add a Subscribe link to comment and registration forms.

      Check out the Getting Started with MailChimp page for information on setting up your lists, forms, and “campaigns” (that is, your newsletter).

      You aren’t required to put out a newsletter on any schedule. If you blog regularly and want everyone on your list to see each post, you can email your list with every post. You can also simply write when something is worth passing on, like a release date for a new book. If you’re giving a reading, or going on tour, MailChimp lets you create sublists based on geography.

Optimize Your Theme for the Mobile Web

      In the past, all you had to worry about when creating a website was how fast it loaded and how it looked on a square monitor attached to a desktop computer. Today, people access the web from traditional desktop PCs, laptops, tablets, and smartphones. Your website will potentially appear on screen sizes ranging from two-inch phone screens to 100-plus-inch big-screen TV monitors.

      To cope with all these changes and simplify both the maintenance issues and the user experience, the movement for “responsive” web design—that is, a design that will automatically provide the best user experience no matter what type of device you’re using—has moved to the fore among the people who make the web. WordPress is no exception.

      When you’re looking for a WordPress design theme, look for responsive themes, as they will give you the best experience for less effort. Searching the WordPress theme directory for “responsive” generates a list of more than 200 themes, so there’s no shortage of options. We recommend installing a theme you like and opening the site with a phone or tablet to see how your site looks. We’ve seen good results with the Responsive and Custom Community themes, along with the default WordPress themes. Depending on the theme, you may be able to adjust settings to get a better result. If you find a theme you really like that is not specifically responsive, you can also use plugins to achieve a better mobile experience. WPTouch works well for this.

      Keep in mind … WordPress, Blogger, TypePad, and Tumblr all have mobile clients for viewing and posting to your site on the go. Check your phone/tablet app store to locate and install them.

Adding Widgets and More Plugins

      All themes in WordPress enable you to install widgets in the web page sidebars that run alongside the main content on your page. Some themes support one sidebar, others two. To experiment with populating your sidebars with widgets, go to the Appearance area and find Widgets. You’ll see a list of available items, ranging from a calendar that helps your readers find your blog posts chronologically, to lists of recent posts and recent comments, to a tag cloud that offers a graphical assessment of the topics you cover. Just drag a widget from the list to the sidebar to add a widget to your site.

      Don’t confuse widgets and plugins. Widgets almost always relate to the aforementioned kinds of features you add to your sidebars. Plugins, such as the social ones described above, often work behind the scenes of your blog and can provide a nearly endless supply of search engine optimization (SEO) tools, spam fighters, event calendars, and contact forms.

      WordPress provides two plugins by default. The first is a toy called Hello Dolly. Click Activate and you’ll see a random lyric from the musical Hello Dolly appear on your administrative page. The other is more important: Akismet, a comment-spam fighter that is perhaps the biggest “must-have” plugin. Don’t set this up on your test site, but be sure it’s turned on for your live site. Akismet is free for personal use, and business licenses are inexpensive and worth every penny.

      Website for author client Victor Villaseñor, author of the New York Times bestseller Rain of Gold.

      Adding new plugins is very similar to the process for adding themes described earlier. From the plugin management page, click Add New to gain access to the free plugin directory at wordpress.org/extend/plugins.

      While there are tens of thousands of free plugins in the WordPress plugin directory, the popularity of WordPress as a web content management system means that commercial developers have produced hundreds more premium plugins, offering more complex functionality.

      Some of our favorite plugins are listed on our companion website, buildauthorplatform.com.

Best Practices for Website Content

      In setting up your author website, remember to optimize these two kinds of content:

      

       Static