Studies in Fiction
custom Wordpress 6.0 site from scratch
William Spencer wrote and self-published a book of short stories and essays on writing. The book is sold on Amazon. He asked me to create a website to promote the book and gather an email list. The site would also serve as a blog for him to post new essays on writing.
William wanted something elegant and simple. This was important to him. “I’m not a celebrity,” he said. I had already chosen WordPress—and he looked at several existing themes for authors and books and thought they were too flashy. He wanted to promote his book without seeming promotional. Understated was another thing he said. Riffing off his book’s minimal cover, I ditched the themes and developed a muted WordPress site from scratch with limited colors, barebones images, and headlines in serif.
I wrote all the website copy and pulled several excerpts from the pre-press proof of the book to fill in a personal hagiography of sorts.
To help build an email list, when I discovered that William had an extra story not included in the book, I suggested he offer it on the website in exchange for readers submitting their email address. He didn’t have a Constant Contact or Mailchimp account (and didn’t want the monthly expense) so I researched a free email newsletter service for WordPress called Mailpoet and set him up with an automated campaign that sends out confirmation emails with a link to a secure URL for the story.
Since the author would be updating the site himself with new posts, I built it using the latest WordPress 6.0, a Kadence foundation, and Gutenberg Blocks.
What I did
- Design
- Copywriting
- Wordpress Development