After watching countless YouTube videos and listening to hours of podcasts offering advice on how to build an author platform, I decided that an author website was necessary. I’d never made a website before, but there was a series of YouTube videos that broke the process down step by step that I felt I could use as a guideline for what to do.
Following the first of the three videos was smooth sailing. It was all about paying for the website, entering in your payment information, and selecting the website package that fit your needs. I was able to follow along with the instructor.
Then…came the second video.
When it came time to actually start formatting the aesthetic of my website, I noticed that the website I was looking at looked slightly different from what the YouTuber was navigating through. This is because companies will constantly update the look and functionality of their website. The goal is to make it a smoother, easier experience for the user. But anyone with a Facebook account knows that that’s not always the case when they make these changes.
Suddenly, the whole interface looks different, and functions that you’ve gotten used to finding in certain places and have accepted as the most logical place for them now are nowhere to be found. Or are cut entirely, even though you may have found them to be some of the most useful applications.
The YouTube videos I was watching weren’t even that old. They had just been published 6 months before I had ventured into making my own website. Sure, they weren’t recently uploaded, but it’s not like I was attempting to follow instructions that were made five years ago and wondering why they were out of date.
Instead of getting the website done in an afternoon or so, as the videos convinced me it might be possible to do, this ended up taking multiple sessions of guess work, with me going “This link sounds like it could be what I’m looking for, let me see….no, that’s not it either. Hmmmmmm.”
This may seem like it was a minor inconvenience that only held me back a couple days, and in a way, that’s true. But in addition to trying to set up this website, I was also working on everything else I needed to do to bring Dig Down to market, was still in the process of working with the editor to polish Dig Down, and was outlining and writing another project that I hoped I’d be able to publish within a year after my first novel.
And these were just the writing goals I had at the time. There was still everything else I had going on in my life that I couldn’t just put on hold to build a website. I usually allotted time on Sundays to work solely on the website, so while it was only a couple of days of trial and error before I figured out how the new interface operated, those couple of days stretched out over an entire month.