Websites for Editorial Freelancers – Why? How? What?

This Roundup offers some links and tips for editors and proofreaders who don’t have their own websites but are thinking of taking the plunge. 

Why you should have a website

• Building a Website for Your Freelance Business: Five Excuses that Shouldn’t Hold You Back (article on Find A Proofreader site by Daniel Heuman of Intelligent Editing) 
• Eight Reasons Why Every Editor and Proofreader Should Have a Website (The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• Why Have a Website for Your Business? (B-List Marketing)
• Why Have a Website? (Dominion Marketing)

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How to build and design your site

• Four links to consider if you want to go it alone: Yola, Weebly, 1&1, and WordPress 
• How to Design a Website for Freelance Editors, Proofreaders and Translators (Daniel Heuman)
• Kate Russell shares her choice of the best site-builders on the web (BBC)

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What else might you include?

• Don’t forget to design a favicon that you can install on your website (that’s the wee little icon that shows up on the tab on the web browser when someone opens your site. The method of installation will depend on the host you use, so delve around in their help pages for advice on how to do this – if a reader has several tabs open at once, it enables them to locate and return to your website more easily. See You Should Have a Favicon for more information. Favicons should be 16x16 pixels. (Anyone with a free Weebly site who wants instructions on how to install a favicon should contact me.)
• Ensure you have some sort of analytics program keeping tabs on each page of your website (e.g. StatCounter or Google Analytics). That way you can see which pages are most popular. This is particularly useful if you have a blog or are using your site to curate a host of resources that you regularly promote.
• Allow your readers to share the content of your site easily by adding sharing widgets (Facebook, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon, Twitter, etc.). Three providers that offer a widget with a range of sharing options are AddThis, shareaholic, and ShareThis (which I used to get the hovering widget on the right-hand side in order to avoid taking up space on the actual blog pages).
• If you want to minimize reliance on drop-down menus and instead advertise key areas of your site, buttons can be useful for helping viewers access pages easily. If you’re not keen on designing them yourself, try something like CoolText Logo and Graphics Generator. After you’ve generated your custom buttons, simply link the graphic to the relevant page on your site.
• Customize your 404 page – that’s the page your viewers see if there’s a broken link. Keep it linked to your main theme, offer some suggestions of how to fix the problem (such as providing a link to your home page), and consider adding in a contact form so that people can get in touch to find what’s been lost. I elected to add a 'search this site' button (see below) to help readers locate what's missing. Read this article by Stephanie Hamilton for some helpful tips. To see my 404 page click here.
• If you have a lot of information on your site (if you have a blog, for example) consider adding a search tool. Some providers offer this as a built-in ad-free function; others, such as Weebly (free version), don’t. As a Weebly user, I therefore elected to place my search engine on a separate page and instead created a linking button. This prevented my information pages becoming cluttered. Alternatively you could decide to invest in your own custom ad-free tool and pay someone to do the design for you.

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Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

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