What does launching your author website actually entail?
Today’s post is inspired by a question from a website client who was considering the DIY approach, but she was concerned about what she might not know, when making the site live.
This reminds me of what it’s like to self-publish a book on Amazon. While it’s easier than ever to simply make your book live, it’s more nuanced to complete the right steps in the right order so that you end up with a quality book that delights your readers.
Your Squarespace author website is similar.
As a minimum, to “launch” your author site, you will need to:
Pay for your Squarespace subscription.
Connect your chosen domain name. This might involve going into the DNS records for the domain name, and setting those correctly so that the new Squarespace site gets shown to visitors. You can also buy a domain name from Squarespace, and typically the connection settings will then be done for you.
Set your website to “public”.
However, there is a lot more that you can and should do, to give your visitors a top-quality experience, and set yourself up for long-term success.
I like to allow at least half a day to launch and test a custom website that I’ve built.
When my clients invest in working with me, they’re trusting me to do all the things they might not even know about, in order to maximize their return on that investment. There are a lot of i’s to dot and t’s to cross, at this stage.
When I launch a full author website for a client, my tasks to make the site live include:
Quality checks, more or less as described in this Squarespace launch checklist.
I design to a high standard as I go along, but there are always late-stage things to finesse, like mobile view, image “alt” tags, the announcement bar, cookie disclaimer notice, and so on.
SEO checks and settings, depending on the level agreed with my client, broadly as described in this Squarespace list.
At a minimum, we want pages to be named sensibly, load properly, all links to work perfectly, and every image to have a description.
And I have my own checklist of post-launch processes too, to confirm everything is working as intended, tie up loose ends, and to safeguard against future problems.
There is usually a waiting time while the “interwebs” catches up with a new website, and Squarespace also issues a security certificate (SSL) which in dire cases can take up to 72 hours. So in a full project, I try to do most of the technical stuff like this ahead of time, to shorten any delay once we are truly ready to publish.
When I get involved to launch a website for an author when they have partially or wholly built it themselves, I also pay close attention to:
Mobile view and how the pages behave on different screen sizes. This is a real “beginner” pitfall in Squarespace. Often, I add custom CSS code to workaround anything that doesn't look good on a smaller screen.
Making sure the client hasn't uploaded images with file sizes that are too big (this can make the pages load slowly, and Google penalizes this).
Making sure images all have "alt" (alternative) tag descriptions, which are needed for blind visitors and also required by Google to be a credible/trustworthy site.
Checking that all page names make sense.
Testing that links (both internal and external) are all working.
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None of the launch steps (well, okay, maybe except the DNS part!) are especially hard, but they do require time, a methodical approach, an understanding of how Squarespace pages are created, and sometimes a few handy tools for testing. But they can make the difference between launching a site that looks truly professional, versus one that screams “I built this myself”.
Conclusion: if your time is better spent elsewhere, work with a professional website designer
My author clients invest in working with me so they don’t have to worry about the technical details, or spend hours learning skills they’ll only use once. Instead, they choose to leave it to a professional and get back to the writing and work they love.
Learn more about working with me, and then inquire here to see if we might be a fit.
Popular resources for a powerful author website
50 step author website checklist (aka, 50 reasons to hire me to do it for you!)
Author website launch checklist (what to do after your site is live)
Beyond the main menu: hidden pages every author website needs
Save 10% off your first subscription for a Squarespace website by using the code PAULINE10
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