Taken from Roni Loren’s website this has to be the wittiest comic panel I’ve seen in awhile.

Roni is redesigning her site and like so many authors is not a web designer. I am not either. I work in media, but I am a project manager. I hire people to design content for me. This means I have more coding skill than the average mope, but I don’t build from scratch¹. I can modify html, xml, css, php, etc, but to varying degrees. This is why my website is hosted by webs.com. They’re templates and design package worked for me when I first built my website.

Now Lori and a number of other people I know simply use a blog as their website. This is doable. I’ve seen it done well. More often than not, it looks like a blog and I think authors should have genuine websites that are designed with a web presence mindset and not a journaling mindset. You are selling yourself and you need to provide information beyond your daily posting and a brief “about” paragraph. This is possible in blogs like Blogspot that allows multiple pages, but all those pages are built in a blog design style as well and I’m just not a fan. That is why I have this blog but also my website. Once I have actual books to sell, the Inkwell page will not just be a collection of everything I’ve written but an actual splash of commercial awesome.

The problem with webs is that it is not keeping pace with the evolution of media. Its HTML features and abilities are limited and the pages are constrained to custom formatting only if I use tables² which makes mobile viewing look like crap.

I’ve thought about moving, but that means revising my website and taking valuable time away from writing while not having anything new to offer. It also means paying someone else. The sites I’m seeing that offer me more what I want to create have a higher monthly cost. I’m frustrated that I can’t use iframes³ on my page, but not so frustrated that I’ll double my monthly hosting page.

What about you? Do you have a website or just your blog? What made you choose one or the other and where you decided to host it?

I did a “how to build your website” post a long time back. Maybe I’ll bring it back as a redux. Incidentally, if you don’t own [your name].com, go do that right now. Sure you may not need it for awhile, but the last thing you want is to need it and someone else has already taken it. Grab it for a year, save up, and then renew for nine. A domain name is different than hosting. It is much cheaper. Consider it on the same level of investment for your career as a computer.

¹ Trick of the trade, designers rarely build from scratch either. They have templates or previous builds that they repurpose to save themselves time.

² Mobile is the future and tables are the past. If you’re using tables, your website is akin to something you would have seen nearly a decade ago. It certainly doesn’t display well on a smart phone. It’s time to consider mobile when you’re making your web building decisions.

³ An iframe is the window you see in web pages when something is embedded, like a youtube video. It used to be an object tag < object >, but that had a lot of additional code required. iframes are quick, easy, and clean, so you can imagine my disappointment that I can’t use them in my website.