As you might know, I’m a big believer in authors building their own websites! It honestly doesn’t have to be a hugely stressful experience, especially not when there are brilliant platforms such as Squarespace and Wix around to make it easy for you.
What’s the best website platform for authors? →
I work with lots of authors who have built their own sites but then ask me to give the sites a professional polish and check they haven’t missed anything out (if this is a service you’re interested in, btw, check out my Author VIP Design Day service).
So in today’s post I thought I’d summarise the main technical things that I notice are often missing from DIY websites.
These are little things but they immediately tell me that the site hasn’t been built by a professional. But the good news is? They’re easy to fix!
So, let’s get stuck in:
1. The site has no favicon
A favicon is the teeny little logo that you can see on the tab of your browser when you’re on a website. It’s basically a visual way to let the website visitor know exactly what website they’re on – and it’s usually a truncated version of the website’s logo. So for Twitter/X it’s that boring black X, for Facebook it’s their logo – the F in a blue box, for Google it’s the G from their logo etc etc…
If you build a Squarespace website but you don’t add a favicon, you’ll have a little black box as your favicon – all Squarespace websites without favicons have the same.
I’ve written a blog post on how to add a favicon to your site here →
2. The site has no social sharing image
A social sharing image is basically an image that appears when your website is linked to from social media.
Most people forget to add one, and so, depending on the social media platform, it’ll either pull through a random image, or nothing at all.
You can add a different social sharing image for each page of your site, but if this seems like overkill, you can set one main social sharing image that will pull through no matter what page of your website you are linking to.
It’s a super quick job to add a social sharing image in Squarespace, and I usually advise taking a screengrab of your homepage, and using this – that way it’s always obvious when you link to your site from a social platform that it’s your website people will be clicking on.
Here’s how to add one.
Again it depends which version of Squarespace your site is built on:
How to add a social sharing logo in Squarespace 7.0
In the Home Menu, click Design, and then click Logo & Title.
Scroll down to Social Sharing Logo.
Drag your image into the image uploader. You can also click Add a social logo to open a file selection menu, then select a file from your computer.
Click Save.·
How to add a social sharing logo in Squarespace 7.1
In the Home Menu click Design, then click Social Sharing.
Click the arrow to upload an image.
If you have a Wix site, here’s how to add a social sharing image →
If you have a Wordpress website, it’s slightly more complicated depending on what template you’re using, but there’s plenty of info out there, so have a Google (and if the fact that Wordpress makes this so complicated drives you nuts, come and join Squarespace, you’ll never look back – mwahahaha).
3. The site has no privacy policy
This is probably not something the average website visitor would notice – but – it is actually legal requirement, so anyone who knows anything about GDPR will know that your site is probably homemade if you don’t have one.
I have a blog post which covers why you need a privacy policy in more detail, as well as some pointers on how to get one. Again, it’s not too laborious a job to sort – the perfect rainy-day activity (!), or something to sort when you fancy a day off from your edits.
Read my blog post about getting a privacy policy for your author website →
4. There’s no copyright declaration in the footer
You might already know that in the UK you own the copyright to anything you create automatically as soon as you create it (including your books!). You don’t need to register it or mark it as yours.
However, the rules are different in other countries and, as we know, the internet is global (!), so it’s never a bad idea to add a copyright designation to the footer of your website, to mark it as your own work and ensure that people know it’s not to be copied.
This is about a five-second job!
All you need to do is add:
©, your author name (or name of your business if you are a limited company), plus the year the website launched until the current year
…in the footer of your site in order to lay claim to all the content on there.
EG:
© Charlotte Duckworth, 2016-2024
5. The site doesn’t have a cookie banner
I know, pop-up cookie banners are super duper annoying, but the truth is that using an opt-in approach for cookie consent is the safest way for websites to stay GDPR compliant.
In case you’re not sure what cookies are, they are tiny pieces of digital information that get saved in your browser every time you visit a website, which speed up the loading of that site in the future and sometimes save information from your browsing history in order to personalise your experience on that website.
It does mean however mean that technically the website is storing data about you, and thus you need to consent to this.
Many many websites do not have cookie banners and this is something that’s really important to sort.
Luckily, if your site is hosted on Squarespace it’s again a super-simple thing to fix.
Here’s how to turn on the built-in cookie banner:
In the Home Menu, click Settings, and then click Cookies & Visitor Data. Check Enable Cookie Banner.
Add a custom banner message to the text field, or click Use The Default Cookie Message to add Squarespace’s preset message.
Choose whether to restrict Analytics cookies.
You can also customise the look of the banner, and its position on the page.
You can change the wording too – take a look at it and make sure it meets your particular requirements. You can find out more about the legislation on cookie banners here.
Wix, like Squarespace, offers a built-in cookie alert, which you just need to add to your site.
If your site is hosted on Wordpress, you’ll find lots of plugins available to add cookie banners so again this should be a quick thing to fix.
Hope that helps – follow these five steps and no one will ever know that you built your website all by yourself (unless you tell them – and you should, because you should be very proud!).
Looking for help with your author website? Discover my web design services for authors here →
I have a really fascinating interview for you today, with the founders of shiny new independent publisher, Pellerin Books! I have heard so many good things about Pellerin already and am very supportive of their determination to ‘do publishing differently’… and so I’m super excited to have pinned them down for a long chat to find out more about their plans.