Heartland

So, I was thinking of setting up a website for my short stories.
I want something that looks fairly professional.
Do any of you good folk who have a greater understanding of things techie know the best way of going about it?
Best provider etc???

Any advice welcomed!

Fanks!

I recently set one up and simply went to meet 3 local website companies in my area, explained my budget and asked what they could do.
I wanted the website to be set up the right way - so that it was optimised for searches and that I could simply access the site to update myself.
The one I chose arranged domain, designed it with/for me (5 page site), and gave me access codes to access from now on. total cost £500.
Anything less than this and you are going to get a generic site with no optimisation, and no domain possibly.

That's my experience... but there will be other ways.

I think the magazine's cost £500 or so also. It's Wordpress which is very easy for those of us that aren't very good tech-wise. I had a half hour lesson and then figured it out myself. It's actually quite fun in it's way.

Thanks both. Food for thought.

Wordpress.com for a free and simple place to write that you can choose your own theme from a gallery of styles.

Otherwise, medium.com allows you to post individual pieces albeit with no interconnectedness or navigation between stories. Medium seems to be popular amongst tech writers and bloggers who don't want the hassle of a full site.

There are lots of free ones that have style galleries etc to make it easier. Most insist on having their logo somewhere but it's a small price to pay for not having to pay a large price. When I started mine I googled "free websites", read lots of reviews and chose one (Weebly). I also paid a small amount to 123.reg to register my own domain name (as opposed to one containing "weebly.com") and a dedicated email address. I looked up how to do search engine optimisation etc (although I'm still rubbish at that). How good it looks depends to an extent on your design skills, but it's all drag & drop, which takes care of a lot. Easy to link pages, update, check stats. Apps to link to Facebook, Twitter etc.

That's one of the advantages of medium.com - if you don't actually need a "site", you just need a place to publish your writings, medium.com is great. They offer some lovely writing tools and the end posts can be made to look as clean or as embellished as you need.

eg:

https://medium.com/@penguinrandomus/7-h ... ead6e60de6

https://medium.com/@Oxford_University/h ... d9344e40f7

https://midcenturymodernmag.com/wouldn- ... 89a827acfd

Thanks Boss. I'll have a gander at them.

The Bossman already mentioned Medium i see, but this link has some others - my creative writing students have found this useful when deciding which platform to use for their online portfolios:

http://www.cmscritic.com/minimalist-blogging-platforms/

I use Wordpress because it gives me the website feel and is p*ss easy to keep updated

(*runs away to do a quick update!)

Thanks Frazer. I'll have a read.

Article on the pros and cons of Medium

http://practicaltypography.com/billiona ... riter.html

Writ­ers who are tempted to use Medium—or sim­i­lar pub­lish­ing tools—should be con­scious of these tradeoffs.

Might if interest to a few on here

Quiff Boy wrote:Article on the pros and cons of Medium

http://practicaltypography.com/billiona ... riter.html

Writ­ers who are tempted to use Medium—or sim­i­lar pub­lish­ing tools—should be con­scious of these tradeoffs.

Might if interest to a few on here

Interesting link ... ... Thanks ...

Con­fi­den­tial to graphic de­sign­ers who are pub­lish­ing sto­ries on Medium: if you wouldn’t set your busi­ness cards in Times New Ro­man, then why would you … ah, for­get it.