1) Find a reliable host. Your web host is the company that will be providing your “space” on the web. They’ll also provide the software you’ll need to make your website run smoothly. There are a lot of hosting options out there; some are great, and some are a complete rip-off. A lot of them will only give you a deal on hosting if you’re willing to pay up front. That’s bad if you have a problem, though, because they have your money, which gives you less leverage. It’s better to pay a little extra and be on a monthly billing cycle.

Two hosts that I’ve had great luck with are 100MegsWebHosting (the host for this site) and EasyCGI (the host for my Army Ant Publishing site, which is not yet publicly available). 100Megs offers a $5 per month hosting solution that’s enough for any small website, and I can vouch for their excellent customer service. My only complaint about them is that they’re stingy with the disk space compared to many of their competitors; if you need more than 40Mb of space, you have to upgrade to the $10 plan. EasyCGI, on the other hand, offers a hosting plan for $8 per month that will give you 350Gb of space. I can’t imagine why you’d need that much, but for the price, it’s an amazing option.

Set up an account with either of those companies, or one of your own choosing, and you’re ready to go.

2) Acquire a domain name: This is your name on the web: www.yourcompanyhere.com. Many places will register these for you for anywhere between $8-$25, but there’s no point in paying top dollar since you’re essentially paying for an electronic service. Two registrars that will both register a .com or a .net for $10 are GoDaddy and EasyCGI. Also, if you’re setting up a brand new site, 100Megs is currently giving away free domain names if you set up a hosting account with them.

I used to swear by GoDaddy, but lately, I haven’t been too impressed. GoDaddy tries every trick in the book to sell you service, and they’ve had to raise a lot of their prices recently because, I’m assuming, they’ve been spending too much on their questionable advertisements. EasyCGI doesn’t hustle you, and they charge the same amount; get a $10 domain there and you’ll be fine. If you own a domain already and you paid more than $10 for it, you can also transfer it to EasyCGI for $10 and get a one-year extension on your registration.

A word of warning about domain names: either set up auto-renew or make sure you renew 14 days or more before your domain name lapses. There’s nothing worse than temporarily losing your domain name (as I recently did!) and having your site go down for days. It’s quite aggravating.

3) Download Wordpress. You can find it at Wordpress.org. To put it simply, it’s the easiest and best small website software I’ve seen out there, and it’s absolutely free. Wordpress will set your site up blog style, but it has tons of options and is very easy to configure. The site it kicks out for you will be just as good as something you could pay a professional to design, and it will give you access to all the bells and whistles you need to change the site to suit your style.

The directions aren’t tricky, but they may require some technical ability; you can always ask your webhost to help you install it if you’re stuck. Wordpress will walk you through most of the installation and give you some simple forms to fill in to create your settings.

From there, you need to install a theme (which you can find on the Wordpress site) and any plugins or widgets you think you’ll need. The nice thing about Wordpress is that you can add in new options or changes, see how they look, and change them very easily without having to write a single line of code. Another advantage is that Wordpress will automatically update your entire site on the fly so you don’t have to worry about keeping your pages consistent. This means that if you change your logo on your main page, you change it on all of them.

As you select a theme to give your site a unique look, I would recommend only using a one or two-column design for your website. If you opt for the two-column design, you’ll have a main content area (where your posts go) and a sidebar. You can do anything you like with the sidebar by clicking on “presentation” and then selecting “widgets” or “theme editor” and making changes. Widgets are much easier to use and edit than the theme editor, so play with them first. Wordpress has plenty of widgets you can add in, so be sure to check some of them out!

Wordpress can generate two types of webpages: posts and pages. Posts are archived by category and will show up on your page in chronological order. I suggest using these for company news and announcements, and keeping them archived in sensible categories. Some categories I would suggest for a publishing site include “Company News,” “Press Releases,” “Reviews,” and a category for each book or line of books that you’re publishing. You can file posts under multiple categories, so a press release about your “Doggone Good” line could be filed under both “Press Releases” and “Doggone Good.”

Pages are a little more permanent, and they’re meant for content that you want immediately available from every location on the site. If you look up at the top of my own site here, you’ll see entries for things like “Home,” “About Sean Jordan,” “Comic Book Writer’s Guide” and “Guide To the Site.” These are all pages that I want to be available to anyone who surfs in so that they can easily find their way to content. I could have done these as posts, but they’re much more useful to everyone when they’re visibly available.

I would suggest having a page called “About Us” that gives some basic information on your company, and a page called “Store” where you either set up your own shopping cart (we’ll discuss that in the next step) or have links to your books on a retail site like Amazon.com. You should probably also set up a page for each book or line of books with information about your titles, including the cover, the author’s name, the publication date, the ISBN, and a summary of the content. If you want to include previews, put those on a separate page and then, using the “Manage / Pages” option in Wordpress, assign those previews to be “children” of the related project page by setting the project page as the “parent.” Just don’t forget to provide a link readers can click on to access the preview!

Wordpress also features something called a “blogroll,” which is really just a fancy name for a “links section.” I would discourage using a blogroll in a product website, unless you really want to link to outside sites. If you do, make sure every link has its target set for “_blank” so that it will open links in a new tab or browser and not take visitors away from your site.

4) Get some shopping software. What you’re looking for here is not just something that will allow you to do ecommerce, but something that will take your visitors to a secure site and allow them to make purchases with a credit card. This will be the most expensive part of your site, but depending upon your scope, it doesn’t have to be.

If you just want to test the waters or you don’t anticipate high sales, you can start with Paypal’s ecommerce service. What I like about this service is that it’s easy to set up and it doesn’t have any usage fees. When a customer makes a purchase, Paypal collects the money, removes its fee, and deposits the rest into your account. The fee is a little high ($.30 plus up to 2.9% of the sale), but the fact that you don’t have to spend a dime on the software up front makes it an ideal solution for a small publisher who’s only going to sell a few hundred books over the course of a year.

If you’re planning on selling a few hundred books a month, you might want to consider a small business merchant account with Yahoo!. There’s a $50 setup fee plus a monthly fee of $39.95 for the basic package, but you only have to pay a 1.5% fee on sales. Paypal has a similar program for $30 per month (no setup), but with a fee of up to 2.9% plus $.30. I think the Paypal service has a little bit more to offer the small business owner, personally, but Yahoo!’s service is reliable as well. It’s always good to know what’s out there.

Here’s a link to a useful article that really goes in depth on other ecommerce options.

Chances are good your host has an ecommerce frontend and backend you can use on your site to keep track of orders, so you may just need a credit card service to ring out your orders. Fortunately, these companies often don’t charge you much more than a small merchant fee on transactions. Unfortunately, they tend to hit you hard with a lot of extra fees. If you’re going to use one of these services, I’d recommend CardService International, since they are one of the least expensive and one of the best rated.

If all that sounds too complicated, or if you’re set up to do Print On Demand through a site like Amazon.com, you can just go ahead and link directly to your products and let your retailer worry about the payment. But if you’re selling through Amazon, you can still make a little bit extra by joining the Amazon.com associates and getting credit for link click referrals to your products or other products you might like to feature.

5) Keep your site updated. Once you’ve got everything you need to get your content rolling, start actually cranking out posts and pages about your products… lots of them! Every time your products are reviewed positively, post a link and a quote from the review. Every time you or one of your authors conducts an interview with a website, podcast, radio show or television show, post up a link with an excerpt. Every time some big piece of news happens with your products, post up an announcement. Every time you’re nominated for an award, or pass a goal, or have something else worth bragging about, post it up on your page. Don’t be shy about talking about your company!

I say this for three reasons.

1) You will naturally improve your search engine results just by having lots of content. There’s no reason to pay someone to submit your sites to search engines; if your site is online long enough, it will be indexed. Registering the site with Wordpress and sites like Feedburner, Technorati, Digg and Reddit will help you get indexed faster because you’ll have more links coming in to your site.

2) Visitors like fresh content — and I can attest to this from experience, believe me! They also like to read about the things they’re interested in. If you’re constantly talking about how great your books are, and they’re interested in your books, they’re more likely to come back and buy your books.

3) The more focused you are on keeping your content fresh, the better a job you’ll do promoting your product, because you’ll start seeking out interviews and reviews, start looking for good promotional quotes, and start thinking about the good news you have to share with your fans.

When it’s all said and done, you can set up a fully-featured, functioning, professional-quality product website within 2-3 days for just under $20. It’s just that easy.

I’ve been a regular Internet user for over a decade now, though I had the fortune of using other online services like AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and local BBS networks before that. In my senior year of high school, I took over a video game review website called eXscape and helped it to become a good niche PC gaming site when it was still possible to make money doing that. (Don’t look for the site now; it’s long gone, as are many of the other sites I worked with at the time!) During that two-year endeavor, I learned all sorts of things about content design: how readers process information, how other sites pick up news, how search engines pick up websites, and so forth. I also learned that knowing some basic HTML (and eventually, CSS) is vital, no matter how good your automated tools are.

Over the years, as I’ve graduated from content creator to a marketing guy and publisher, I’ve been able to use those skills to do all sorts of fun things (including this page!), and while I loathe tinkering with templates and reverse-engineering code to make my blogging software do what I want, I’m glad I know how to do it so I don’t have to rely on someone else to do it for me. I’m also glad that when it comes to creating my page for Army Ant Publishing and related products, I won’t have to hire a web design firm to set up the page for me; I’ll simply need to contract artists to help me design the graphics.

I’m glad I’m ahead of the curve here, because many small publishers aren’t very good at using the Internet to promote their product. I’ve seen publishers who have launched their company websites through Geocities, with pages that crash browsers and that fail to load properly due to poor placement of javascripts. I’ve seen publishers who have used sites that have been so reliant on Flash that they contain no useful information; just a bunch of slow-loading animations. And worst of all, I’ve seen websites that have contained out-of-date information (and sometimes, even tentative covers and titles!) for books that have been out for some time. Often, there is no ordering information or link to a place to buy the book, either.

It’s obvious that these publishers aren’t considering that the world wide web is where 75% of the population turns for information, and that the design of their website will speak volumes about their products. There’s no excuse for a poor website, either; they’re not hard to set up, and there are tons of people out there (especially students) who are willing to design basic websites for next to nothing. Basic hosting can be found for $5-10 per month, and most of these hosts will offer everything a small publisher really needs. And domain names (like http://www.armyantpublishing.com) are incredibly cheap these days; I register mine through Godaddy for a piddling $9.95 per domain name. A Yahoo merchant account is only $75, and it allows a company to set up a store and take credit cards. All in all, a competent website can be easily set up for well under $500, and in many cases, for less than $200 if the publisher has access to artists and copywriters.

If you’re a small publisher and planning to have any presence on the web (and I’d suggest you do!), you probably want to remember the following tips before you settle than a less-than-adequate website.

Buy as many variations of your domain name as you can think of. If you’re setting up “Doggone Publishing,” you will want to try to register “doggone.com,” “doggonebooks.com”, “doggonepublishing.com” and so forth. You might want to register “doggonepublishing.net” as well, but I wouldn’t worry about domain extensions like “doggone.biz” or “doggone.us” — .com and .net are really the only two most people use. It’s also not necessary to get any extra services or register them for multiple years; you can do all that stuff later, if needed. Do make sure your webhost will allow you to auto-renew, though; there are companies that prey on others by picking up expiring domain names and trying to sell them back for exorbitant costs.

Unless you feel a domain name is a must have, DO NOT pay large sums of money for it. Domain names are important, but they’re becoming less important as people use search engines and link engines for their web browsing. The people out there paying thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of dollars for domain names are idiots.

Once you purchase your domain names, you can have them all direct to the index page of your website. Your webhost can help you figure out how to do this.

You should also plan to register domain names for your various products, if possible. Never announce a product before you register a product name; there are people out there who search for product announcements and who try to snatch up related domains in the hopes that they’ll be able to sell them to you. Beat them to the punch and save yourself the trouble.

Make your index page simple, but not too simple. The index page, for those who don’t know, is the main page that people will see when they visit your website. It should provide an easy portal for people to explore your site without having to search too hard for whatever it is they’re looking for. Think of it as the entrance to your booth in an endless bazaar of merchants — people who are visiting need to be able to see all the neat things you have to offer or they’ll move on.

Do not — and let me repeat this again: do not!– make your index page a picture of your logo with a “click here to enter” link. Likewise, do not make your index page a flash animation or a video. To continue my analogy, putting up an index page with a logo, flash animation or video is like setting up a closed booth with no windows and a heavy wooden door. People won’t see what’s inside, and unless they feel like venturing in, they won’t bother to find out. And if you force them to watch an orientation video every time they walk in the door, they probably won’t come back.

A functional index page should include your logo, links to your various departments, a brief summary of what your company does, and — don’t forget this — copyright information along the bottom. Keep it simple, and make sure it’s easy to navigate.

Many companies like to make their index page the “news” page, and that’s fine, because it serves the needs of visitors wanting to find out about the latest buzz. If you’re going to set your page up like that, make sure you include a sidebar explaining who you are. You’ll also want a menu, either along the top or along the side, that will allow readers to quickly find their way to your products if they aren’t interested in wading through your news. And as a reminder, any time you mention your products in your news section, you need to remember to include a link to their respective pages on your site. Many web surfers will enter your site through your news articles, and it’s important to give them quick access to your product pages.

For a publisher that’s just starting out and that won’t have much news to share, I’d actually suggest making your index page a simple introduction to your company with graphical links to other sections of the website. You won’t want to open with news because anything you post will stay up there for awhile and make it look like not much is happening with your company. Instead, just offer a nice introduction to your company and prominent links to your products.

Your site needs to be organized. Don’t just lump everything together; divide it into sections. Create a section for news, a section for products, a section for corporate information, a section for your message boards (if you’re including them) and a section for your store. If you want to crosslink sections, that’s fine; for example, you can (and should!) link your products to their entries in your store, just as you should link news about your products to your products. But keep everything organized so that readers don’t get lost.

One trick I always recommend is to make your logo (which generally runs across the top of the page) always link back to your index page so that readers can quickly escape back to your index if they get lost.

Meta tag descriptions are important on your most visited pages. These are descriptions that you write into the code of each page on your website that tell search engines what your website is about. Most websites use these when they return hits; they can be the first impression a potential reader receives about your site. If your software doesn’t offer you an easy way to insert them, visit this page for a tutorial.

You don’t need to generate meta tag descriptions for every page on your site, but you should set one up for your index page explaining what your site offers. Keep the description under 200 words, though; search engines will reject them if they’re too long. I recommend writing descriptions for your product pages and your index page, at the bare minimum.

Don’t worry about meta tag keywords; they used to serve a purpose, but now, search engines almost always ignore them.

Don’t forget to include vital information about your products. Every product page should, as a minimum, include a sharp picture of the book’s cover, a 1-3 paragraph summary of its contents, links to previews of the book, the ISBN, the cover price, and information on where it can be purchased. If you’re feeling ambitious, you might want to list other information too, like the publication date, the number of pages, the number of printings, and so forth.

Always link to Amazon.com’s entry for your book, even if you’re selling it in your own store. Amazon often carries reviews and other information that’s useful to your potential customers, and many will come back to your site if you:

1) Any time you like to another site, including Amazon, include Target=”_blank” in your anchor tag. It will open the link in a new tab or window for the user. That way, the reader can get back to your site easily. And don’t worry; it won’t be stopped by a popup blocker since it’s a link the user clicks to activate instead of being launched automatically by your site.

2) Offer something Amazon can’t, like a signed copy of the book for the regular cover price. Readers are more likely to buy from you if they know they’re getting something special!

You should always include a page with information about your company, but do not link your email address directly from the page. There are tons of nasty little programs out there called “spam harvesters” that scour the web day and night for email addresses, which they compile into a database that’s used to send spam. You’ll spend more time deleting mail than reading it, and it will waste a lot of your webserver’s time, too.

There are ways to defeat these programs, and this site has some techniques to help you do it. If you don’t want to go hi-tech, you can list your email address like so:

Contact me at sean AT sean-jordan DOT com

It’s not elegant, but it gets the job done!