Making the book author website design
Carole Brungar is a New Zealand novelist and author. Her books include titles from romance novels to her Nam series about the Vietnam War. She had a basic website that was certainly in need of a major update. She therefore sought a book author website design that was befitting of her award-winning novels.
Carole wanted a clean, professional website that would showcase her books and subsequently encourage sales. What’s more, to engage with readers, she also wanted to promote her email sign-up list and social media channels.
Project Overview:
To build a responsive book author website design that would encourage sales and promote email and social media signups.
Services Provided:
- WordPress web design and development
Rewriting the book author website design
The completed WordPress author website design certainly achieved the results that Carole wanted.
Firstly, we promoted her latest novel with a striking header banner. This showcased the formats that the book was available in and also a teaser to entice readers to buy.
To reinforce the latest book, we then dedicated a section to it underneath the banner. This section had a catchy blurb from the book, along with a selection of reviews to reinforce just how popular it was. Furthermore, we incorporated action buttons to read more about the book or to buy.
We repeated this with the other books in the Nam series in order to dedicate homepage real estate to selling books.
Secondly, we encouraged email list sign-ups by having a standout banner that swooped across the page. This encouraged readers to sign up and hear from Carole about latest news, book launches, updates and offers.
Finally, social media sign-ups were built in to the book author website design throughout. Carole’s Facebook page is her prime social media channel. Therefore, we included a button in the header and footer menu bars. Furthermore, we put a like box for her page throughout the website.
Building this book author website design gave Carole the custom and responsive professional site that she wanted.
User experience book author website design
We wanted both the user interface and the user experience to be clean and easy to navigate.
The interface saw nice big, bold images of the books and the formats that they were available in. We wanted this to be as clean and uncluttered as possible. This setup allowed readers to easily buy a book or subsequently read some more on the backstory.
Each book had a dedicated page that gave a synopsis. In order to promote its popularity, we included a selection of reviews that other readers had submitted. What’s more, to further reinforce the quality of the books, we also highlighted the awards each had won. Conveniently next to action buttons to buy or read more reviews.
In the footer we also promoted the other books in the series. Readers could therefore buy one or more novels in the range.
SEO
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is certainly crucial in any book author website design. Novelists require that fans of the genre as well as their own loyal followers can equally find their books.
We therefore built the website on a sound SEO foundation with the appropriate structured data mark-up. We also incorporated a sitemap and breadcrumbs so search engines were fully aware as to the site structure, levels and layout.
Furthermore, the relevant title tags, Meta descriptions, alt tags and keywords were built in to each page. What’s more, images were optimised for search with small file sizes for loading speed.
The overall result was an author website that ranked well in search.
WordPress web design CMS
Coding this book author website design on the WordPress content management system (CMS) gave further benefits.
Carole could update the content and add new books once they became available. What’s more, blog posts could be written and added to the website so that readers could follow and connect with her.
Book sales are increasing as a result of the new website. So too are the author’s communications with her readers due to email, social media and blog post interactions.
Project results:
Professional and responsive book author website design built on the WordPress CMS.
Increased book sales across all titles.
Increased reader interaction, email sign-ups and social media follows.