Authors and budding authors need to have a website. It's the law. But if you're not careful it's a rabbit hole that you can take a long time checking out before you emerge dazed and confused.
Back in the 1990s a basic website started out life like this:
<!DOCTYPE html> <html> <head> <title>Captive Words - Home</title> </head> <body> <h1>Captive Words</h1> <p>This is what a website used to be.</p> </body> </html>
If you copy that lot and paste it into a text document and name it index.html then open it in your browser it will show you a really basic website.
The bits in angle brackets <> enclose html tags (Hyper Text Markup Language). The html tags tell the browser what's going on in the document. The <head> </head> section is not displayed directly but describes the document. In our simple page there's a title that is used by the browser. The <body> </body> section is the page to display. <h1> </h1> tags enclose a heading level 1, just like in a word processor. <p> </p> encloses a paragraph. If you look somewhere like W3Schools they have all the tags that you can think of. And then some.
Bizzarely, one of the latest measures of web page quality is how long a page takes to load. This page is less than 200 characters long, so imagine how fast it loads into a browser. But there's nothing there!
I read a book called "HTML Artistry" which was a revelation. At that time there were no smart phones and you could only view websites on a PC of some kind. Some of those ideas still work, some of them have been left behind, "deprecated". Like me,
Larry Wall invented Perl, and that shook things up a bit. Perl was one of the first server side scripting languages that was designed to generate pages on the fly.
Javascript turned up courtesy of Brendan Eich, and it meant that you could add dynamic page interactivity to the client side (in the browser).
CSS was the icing on the cake. It meant that you could tell the browser how you wanted it to display the html elements on a page.
At the time it was an explosion of technology, and each browser manufacturer interpreted it all in their unique way.
Fast forward to now. We have standards coming out of our ears, mostly agreeing across browsers. We have a smorgasbord of server side scripting languages: Perl, Python, PHP, Ruby, Ruby on rails. Each one better than the last of course.
If you ever listened to Deep Purple's Made in Japan LP, there's a track where someone says "can we have everything louder than everything else?". Web development feels a bit like that at the moment. Everything is the best, although sometimes best means most esoteric.
So for all of us mortals,
How the hell do we judge the best way to build our websites?
When you look around, there are several types of people who create websites:
Website builders
Company marketing sites
Content creators
Website builders can afford to get into the minutiae because that's what they get paid for. Companies can afford to pay website builders to create a stylish presence in the latest market space. Content creators generally need a tool that allows them to talk to the world without breaking the bank.
The latest thing is static site generators, sites that contain html, and CSS. Hugo, Jekyll, Astro. They create pages that load fast and look good. They tend to be the domain of Website builders and interested techies, I have no issues with either, but I want to create content.
What we're looking for is a thing called a Content Management System (CMS). It handles all the magic behind the scenes. Web page contents are stored in a database and when the server gets a page request from the browser:
the server scripting language looks up the details of the site theme that tells it how to put the page together
it adds the page content
adds any nice extras like adverts from Google
wraps it all up to look like an html file
sends it back to the browser
The browser gets the page, styles it and bingo you have a page in your browser.
One of the most common CMSs is called Wordpress. It allows you to create web content just like working a word processor. And it does a good job. There are others like Joomla, Drupal, Squarespace, Wix, (the list goes on) but they all do that same thing, they let you create content that looks good.
For what it's worth that's my answer. If, like me:
you don't want to have to spend time tweaking your CSS.
you do want to get on and create some actual content.
you do want a system that works a bit like a word processor.
you don't really care what's under the hood
you just want it to work.
then you're looking at a CMS. Wordpress (www.wordpress.com) is an example of a server based CMS that you can use for free. Out of the box, that will give you a site that's called yoursite.wordpress.com. Not great but free. Or for a moderate annual fee you can have your own domain name like my_writing_site.com. They will manage it all, doing backups, upgrading security, and all that techie stuff. You log into your site, select a theme and create great content. There is some work to do of course, but it's no harder than the word processor, graphics program and spreadsheet. There are caveats of course, if you go with free then whatever host you choose will put adverts on your site. If you pay for your domain name and a cheap package it's clean and all yours.
If you're that way inclined you can pay for hosting and install things like wordpress for yourself. It's not hard, but the overhead is not trivial either.
I found another CMS alternative. It's still a CMS but it works slightly different. It's called Publii. You get to choose a theme to shape and style the site. Publii keeps track of all your source information on your laptop/desktop and you write all your pages using a word processor-like interface and all that good stuff. You can press a button and preview your site on your PC. You can build your basic site and get it ready to go without leaving your own computing hardware. When you are ready you can select a web hosting provider, and for small static sites there are some free ones, like Netlify and Static.App. You will have to pay for a domain name and set that up, all information is in the Publii online documentation. The Publii program will write your site direct to the webhosting for you. So your site appears out there.
So the current rhetoric tells us that what's important is size and speed? So I did a bit of testing using Pingdom just for fun. I checked the page load stats for www.wordpress.com and it loaded in just less than 1 second with a payload of just under 3 megabytes. I did the same thing with getpublii.com and it had a load time of 2 seconds and a payload of 650K. Both measured from San Francisco. Measured from Europe wordpress was the same, getpublii came in sub 1 second. So in the real world it shows us that Wordpress really put the effort into their delivery system.
But even though some pundits tell us that people skip pages that don't load within a second, some of the most successful business sites are over 2 seconds. So my conclusions are:
The main issue is actually PAGE CONTENT.
If you write interesting stuff, people will wait a few seconds to read it.
If you're an author your readers will wait a few seconds to get to know you better.
If you have an interesting experience to share, people will wait a few seconds to read it.
Regardless of the choice you make, it's worth spending a day or two to check out your options. Ask yourself if the solution you're trying out feels OK to you, because it's not a one size fits all world.
Just for reference:
This site runs on Publii. So far, so good.
My daughter set up a Wordpress website with her own domain name on Wordpress.com on the beginner tariff. She found it easy to manage, and she didn't worry about page load times.
I talked to people who had a good experiences with Wix and Squarespace.
So there is no hard and fast answer, as you probably guessed at the start.
Find something that you can understand and live with, that's within your budget. Go and add value to your books and create content.
