Design It Well

As an author, you recognize the importance of having an eye-catching book cover. Well, the same things goes for your landing page. Make it visually engaging for your visitors. Don’t burden the page down with heavy, lengthy content. Instead, incorporate elements from your book’s cover into the layout. Tie-in the book with the landing page and visitors will have a clear understanding about who you are, what your book is about and how to purchase a copy.

Get A Reaction

The landing page for your book’s website is like your own personal salesperson. For that reason, you want the page to share a compelling message that makes the page unique and that will increase conversion. This can be accomplished by writing a headline like, “Only 10,000 Copies Available,” or “Read the Bestseller That Critics Are Raving About.” Additionally, you want to be direct with your visitors and state a clear call-to-action such as “buy now” or “subscribe here.” Keep them short and sweet.

State the Value

Remember that whitespace is a friend to any good landing page. More is not better. Keep your content succinct and to the point. Save the flowery language for your book and use your landing page to give short, bullet points about why your book is a must-read and must-buy. Explain what sets it apart from other books within the genre and even one or two about yourself as an author. Visitors that know value are more likely to purchase.

When you create a landing page for your book try to think about what motivates you as a buyer. Use what you know and you’ll have a fantastic landing page constructed in no time.

Technorati Tags: blog design, book sales, Web Design, Web Development

If you’re just starting out and wondering what you’ll need to include in an e-commerce site, consider reading 5 Universal Principles for Successful eCommerce Sites. Smashing Magazine has written a detailed piece that walks you through some of the core features that an e-commerce site needs in order to be effective.

Unlike a basic website or a simple blog, e-commerce sites require additional functionality in order to process financial transactions safely and securely. Depending upon what your needs are, the amount of inventory that’s being sold and what your budget parameters are, you may want to consider using Magento. As an open-source e-commerce platform, Magento has a tremendous amount of support and customization options for users. The high-level of flexibility makes it a leader in e-commerce software solutions.

Conducting research on e-commerce trends, industry changes, new technology and consumer demographics is vital to remaining competitive and staying business. Knowing that consumers are growing averse to using credit cards for online purchases or why they’re abandoning shopping cart sites can help you avoid failure before you have a chance to get started. Research can also dispel any myths or preconceived notions about e-commerce. For instance, men spend more than women online not vice versa.

Launching an e-commerce site sounds like a great idea, but if you don’t really know where to begin it can seem pretty intimidating. A quick read of E-Commerce Explained: A Research Paper will help synthesize the process and make the concept and process easier to digest.

It’s important to keep your finger on the pulse of the e-commerce industry. Knowing that e-commerce growth is slowing, but still out-pacing retail can help with profit forecasting and expenditure reduction. Digging up data that shows how Facebook and social media is influencing the buy process can be used to adjust your marketing strategy.

Take some time to get familiar with what works, before you spend your resources on implementing an ecommerce plan. If you do it right, you’ll have your e-commerce shopping cart full in no time.

Technorati Tags: E-Commerce, Web Design

So you’ve written your first novel, or maybe it’s your second, fifth or even 20th, what do you do with your website? As an author in today’s modern world, it’s mandatory to have an online presence. Your fans and readers want to find you and connect with you, and so do the press, literary agents and others. Having a professional, well-designed and well-organized website can boost sales, increase media exposure and set you apart from other authors.

Sadly, many best selling authors have neglected this key marketing tool and still others have jumped on a cookie-cutter bandwagon making their sites indistinguishable from the masses. We spent some time looking at a few outstanding (and disappointing) author websites and put together a list of inspirational URLs that are unique and on point.

Peter Carey. This is a fantastic site that is extremely easy to navigate and leaves no one guessing about who the author is. The color scheme is subtle, but pleasing. Carey has done a great job including audio and video throughout the interface and organized it quite well too.

Augusten Burroughs. A true reflection of the author’s personality, this site is a tribute to creativity and targeted messaging. It’s simple to find the author’s bio, upcoming events, new and contact details. Even though there’s a strong visual presence, it doesn’t detract from the site’s true purpose – inform readers about newest book and find additional information quickly.

Nicholas Sparks. The nice thing about Spark’s site is that it’s perfectly appealing for his target audience. The clean layout and soft color schema have a modern femininity about them. This is an excellent example of how an author is using technology to extend the circle of attraction that his written body of work has among loyal readers.

Stephen King. If you’re expecting buckets of blood or Flash-designed bats to float around the screen you’ll be sorely dismayed. King maximizes his site’s ability to deliver an onslaught of regular news and ongoing updates. Front page (literally) and center, all the latest publicity and coverage is right at your fingertips. At the same time, the site continues to make superb use of navigational components.

Miranda July. Absolutely one of the most innovative author websites ever created. You can’t deny the fact that once you’re on the site you’re instantly hooked and want to read more. Although this site is extremely unconventional, it’s totally unforgettable and sticks with you long after you’ve entered another Google search term. Unfortunately, the actual author site isn’t nearly as impressive as the path that you take to get there. This site is included in our list because it’s a good demonstration of ‘thinking outside of the box’.

We hope these sites offer some assistance when it comes to constructing your own.

Technorati Tags: Web Design, Web Development

Here’s a list of a few basic ones that add a great deal of benefits and create a great foundation of plug-ins to build on for any blog.

All in One SEO Pack

Now, you can use your WordPress blog for your SEO campaign. The free plugin “All in SEO pack” is designed for SEO with the help of WordPress blogs as it readily optimizes your blog. It automatically generates Meta Tags allowing your blog to get necessary exposure in search engines. While using the plugin, you can find the option to optimize your title and set Meta Description and Meta Keywords for your blog.

Sociable

Many social networking sites allow their users to save and share interesting online blog posts. The Sociable plugin of WordPress adds your blog links to your favorite social bookmarking sites. WordPress allows you to select from 99 different sites and add them to your blogs. The plugin works only on the recent versions of WordPress ie 2.6 or the later versions. The best part of using the plugin is you can distribute your blog posts among your readers on those sites and boost your niche audience.

WP Super Cache

This is a useful WordPress plugin to generate static HTML files from your WordPress blog which is served faster by the web server. Your web server won’t have to process heavier PHP scripts if you use this plugin. The plugin also enables 99% of your visitors to visit static HTML files. The plugin supports multiple storage back-ends such as Disk, eAccelerator, Memcached, APC, XCache. It doesn’t require any admin setting.

Contact Form 7

It is a contact form plugin of WordPress that supports multiple contacts. With the help of this plugin you can customize email content and the contact form flexibly. The plugin also supports CAPTCHA and AJAX powered submitting. You can activate this plugin for your blog from the ‘Plugins’ menu of the WordPress. The particular plugin has been translated into number of languages.

Google XML Sitemaps

The plugin automatically generates XML sitemap for the WordPress blog that is compliance with Google Sitemap. The feature is available with all versions of WordPress and it doesn’t require any PHP skill or file changes. The plugin also generates a zipped version of the file along with the static XML file. It supports all WordPress Generated and customized pages. The sitemap is automatically updated every time you update your existing blog or create new post. The major search engines are also notified about the updates.

FD Feedburner Plugin

The FD Feedburner redirects the main feed and the comments to feedburner.com. The feeds of your blog easily become the feed of the feedburner for all users.  It simply requires informing the plugin about the Feedburner feed URL. The plugin is available with WordPress 2.0 o higher versions of WordPress. It is also compatible with all webservers. It doesn’t require setting up new hidden feeds, modify templates, or .htaccess files.

WP-SpamFree

This powerful plugin is designed with spam filtering features and can check blog comment spam, pingback and trackback spam. The spam-free plugin automatically blocks the spam and displays the statistics of blocked spam on your dashboard. It uses cookies and dynamic combo of JavaScript and can prevent more that 99% of the spam. The plugin helps to keep your database less crowded.  It works like a “Firewall” and works in WordPress menu as well.

Akismet

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam or not and lets you review the spam it catches under your blog’s “Comments” admin screen. Personally, I can’t live without this one.

Google Analyticator

The plugin appends the tracking support of Google Analytics to your WordPress blogs. Google Analyticator is a customizable widget that eliminates the need of editing of you blog templates. The plugin includes other widgets that help to view visitors’ data generated by Analytics.  The blogger has complete control over the options and can enable and disable any of the option as per the requirements. Just install this plugin and track your visitors’ behavior in real time.

SEO Smart Links

The plugin has SEO benefits as it automatically links the keyword of your blog with corresponding posts, tags, categories. It allows you to select your keyword and phrases, and set up the matching URLs. You can also set the nofollow attributes and option to open the links in another window. The options can be edited from the administration setting panel. You can enhance internal linking of your site with the use of this plugin. It also allows you to control external links. So, you got your smart link builder for free, huh!

Broken Link Checker

The plugin monitors the links on your blog posts, pages, custom fields, and indicates if there is any. It detects the broken links and missing images, and notify on your dashboard. If you enable the option it can display the anchor texts differently on the post. A very useful WP plugin, it can save help you help you trace all broken links and fix them early enough.

Do you have a favorite?Is there are must have plug-in that I left off the list?

Technorati Tags: blog design, plugins, wordpress