Book Marketing & PR, Wordpress/ Author Websites

12 reasons you should use WordPress for your author website or blog

WordPress is a bit like Apple, Le Creuset or Clinique Skincare. Once people start using their products they are hooked for life and wouldn’t consider using anything else. They makes users lives more efficient, simpler, and better even if they didn’t know that they needed the product in the first place.

Delicious! The lasagna doesn’t look too bad either! (Image courtesy of dimplearts.com)

They are cult brands, and for good reason! When people consider whether they should use WordPress or another website system to host their author website, they often aren’t convinced that WordPress is the right choice until they start using it how beautiful and intuitive it is.

And then people will be “Wordies” for life because it’s just plain fantastic.

~ It’s important to note that WordPress is not just a blogging system! Yes it can be a fantastic system for blogging, but it’s so much more than that. This very site – 30DayBooks.com is built on WordPress, and you’ll see that it’s not just a blog.

You may have heard that there are two kinds of WordPress sites – WordPress.com and WordPress.org. For an easy understanding of the difference between the two, stay tuned for a post next week.~

Here are my top 12 reasons why you need to use WordPress – and nothing else – to host your author website.

1. It’s easy to use

There is a superbly easy learning curve. It might take a few days to get used to, but after you’ve mastered the basics you are usually good to go. I’m pretty sure that I could teach my 86 year old Grandma to use WordPress within a day! She already knows how to use Microsoft word, and with that basis, she can easily use WP and so can you.

2. It’s great at filtering spam

A spam comment rarely slips through the net on any of my sites. Commenters don’t need to use Capture It or any other form of identification which results in more comments. In my experience, using an identification tool such as Capture It will create a huge obstacle for comments and that is not a good thing if you want to grow your blog.

3. It saves as you go

You’ll never have to worry about pressing save regularly, or losing your work when your browser freezes or Internet crashes. It will also save various versions of your drafts so you can go back to old versions if you want to. This has saved my butt on several occasions.

4. You can schedule posts

I LOVE this feature. Last month when I went away for 3 weeks, I had all my posts scheduled for the entire time and they were automatically tweeted on Twitter too. WP was working as my little assistant over here and she did a grand job.

5. You can preview a post

So if you want to see how a post or page is going to look without having to publish it, you can. Brilliant!

6. Spel cheq. Spell check.

No further explanation needed here!

7. No coding knowledge required

You do not need to know any code in order to have full control and completely manage your site.

Let that sink in.

The cost benefits of this are huge! Five years ago you would have had to pay $5000+ for a website that looks and functions as well as most WordPress sites do today.

Aside from the upfront cost-saving, you’ll never have to hire a designer or web developer again, once you can learn the easy way you can make changes whenever you want. You no longer have to wait on your web-person either. This can result in HUGE long-term cost, time, and sanity savings!

8. Themes galore!

With the huge variety of themes out there, and more being produced every day, you can pretty much have a site that looks how you want it to with just a click of a button. Some premium themes are paid (and have better features such as built in SEO etc as a result), but if you are on a tight budget there are plenty of beautiful free ones out there too. See the images below to see what I mean.

WordPress themes

Just a few of the HUGE selection of WordPress themes out there. Find over a thousand paid themes at Theme Forest or free ones here.

9. It works well with search engines

You don’t have to understand the science here exactly or why this is so important, but it is. Just know that this means that your web pages have great visibility and show up on searches quickly and often which is a GREAT thing.

10. It has tons of ‘plugins’

Put simply – plugins are tools that you add to WordPress in order to make the site run in the way in which you would like without having to code anything. Plugins can do things like improve your search engine optimization, add social media icons to your site, add sign up form to your side bar, analyze your traffic and so on. Pretty much anything you would wish for. They take about 3 seconds to install.

11. You can’t outgrow it

It is customizable to anything if and when you need to be flexible. You don’t have to go beyond the basic features, but if you do ever need anything more complicated, you can easily have it.

This might not be important to you if you are just starting out, but let me tell you now, you DO NOT want to have to switch websites in a year or two because you have outgrown your current site. Save the headache and start with something that is flexible enough to partner you for the ride when you become a best selling author ;)

12. The WordPress community

If there is ever ANYTHING that you are unsure of how to do on WordPress, I bet that there is a forum thread, blogpost, or some other form of documentation written in PLAIN English that tells you how to do it. WordPress has a pretty strong cult following, and someone, somewhere has the answer to your query. This alone will save you $$ AND stress since you won’t have to crawl Google for hours, or call up a web developer or your brother in law to wait for a fix.

What did I miss? What do you love about WordPress? 

pssstt…. Looking for a new author website? 30 Day Books has just released Authorlicious, a WordPress theme built *just* for indie and self-published authors! Find out more here…