Personal Website Setup Advice

 When setting up a personal website, there are a few different things one must consider, including presentation and appearance of the site, how easy the site is to navigate, content, digital voice, personality, and interaction. In this post I’ll be providing a walkthrough on how to do these things.

Say, for example, you want to make a website where you would offer copywriting and editing services to authors. For something like this, there are two main target audiences: authors and prospective readers. In order to make sure your audience stays on your site, it should be easy on the eyes. As the World’s Worst Website has shown, too many distracting colors, both in the text and in the site itself, looks ugly and can drive the audience away. The next step is making sure your site is easy to navigate. Also demonstrated by the World’s Worst Website, dead or broken links make navigation very difficult, and you should always make sure each link can lead back to the home page. Different types of content should be organized in tabs as well.

Moving on to the content, in this case you would want your content to show authors that you know what you’re doing when it comes to copywriting and editing. For prospective readers, you would want to show them why the books you copyright and edit would be good reads. If you have already copyrighted or edited any books prior to starting the site, a good place to start with content would be reviews that help to advertise those books; this way readers can be enticed to read them and authors can see what you’ve done, sort of like a portfolio. If you haven’t, reviewing books that you’ve read and stating what, if anything, you would revise would be a good start, since it would build your reputation with readers and show authors that you know what you’re doing.

Next, onto your digital voice and personality. You’re trying to attract customers, so you would want to have a more professional sort of personality, but at the same time you don’t want to be over-professional, since you want to give genuine suggestions to authors whose books you’d edit and copyright, and genuine opinions to prospective readers, so you’d want your digital voice to be casual to an extent. When it comes to engagement, you should make some time to respond to any questions and comments you get on your articles or posts, so that any questions readers have about your reviews can be answered in a more personal way, and any questions or inquiries from authors can be answered as well. As Susmita Asad explains in her article “How to Respond to Instagram Comments”, building this connection between yourself and your audience helps to increase brand loyalty, engagement in general, and establish a sense of trust, as well as help gain a better understanding of what your audience wants or expects.

That's it for this post, hopefully it can set you up for success!