Well, what about design?

Graphic design is an art form and if you can budget for real design help, it’s well worth it! But if that’s not in the budget, your site can still look good, and you can still lay out some graphics that will help to promote your work.

If you’re a visual person as well as a word person, I hope you know everyone thinks you’re obnoxious — I’m looking at all you heckin webcomic writers. Get out of here! You don’t need this information.

If you’re not a designer, but graphic design is your passion, that’s awesome. Spend as much time on it as you want.

And finally, if you think design is intimidating or boring or takes too much time, you’re in a boat with me. I’ll talk about how I handle that.

Design has two big jobs:

Capture the vibe.

First you need to figure out your vibe and the tricky part is that it isn’t necessarily your personal aesthetic, but how you want people to feel when they’re on your site. Ideally, that matches the tone of your content. Ideally, you want to get that across in every font, photo, and graphic you share. Those ideals are hard to realize, and why graphic design is an art form! Without working really hard — studying other designs, learning the in’s and out’s of a design program, lots of practice — or hiring a designer, my best advice is decide on some fonts, colors, and graphic elements and stick to them like glue. Make templates. For each new graphic, make as few changes as possible. If you’re inspired to make something new, and it gets frustrating halfway through, find relief by falling back on your template and be done with the damn thing.

Be recognizable.

If someone is scrolling fast through their TL, they should still notice your post. If they like your content, noticing will make them scroll back up and see what you have to say. That’s the whole point. If your design is really bold, someone might still notice it. If your headlines are clickbaity, someone might still click on the link. If they don’t like the actual content, though, bold design and tempting titles aren’t going to keep working. The bookish community is fueled by strong opinions and good design helps find new readers, but it won’t keep them all by itself. It just needs to help your people notice your stuff.

Look at BookTube

I spend a lot of time on YouTube, so I’m predisposed to think about the design and marketing on there, but it’s an interesting deep dive for anyone — for book people, dive into the BookTube channels. Here’s why:

• YouTube promotes creators in grids and lists of video thumbnails that are exactly the same size, plus a small amount of space for a title. That’s all the opportunity they have to grab you. Compared to a search engine results page, or a Twitter timeline, or even an Instagram feed, on YouTube, a creator has one option. They can’t rely on text or a gif or a gallery. Successful designs are usually very consistent and attention-grabbing.

• There’s a big variety of content all in one list, trying to do the same job. What grabs you? What does the design make you expect from the video inside? Do any of them remind you of your own content?

• On BookTube, creators have competing design to incorporate into their designs: book covers. Their design needs to support, but not get overwhelmed by those covers. So does yours! How do they do it?

I recommend just exploring YouTube, looking at channels’ video archive as a group. Alternately, this video will do a lot of the work for you! Kayla of BooksandLala spent a year experimenting with different thumbnail styles in an effort to find one that captures the vibe of her videos, and she does a wonderful job exploring that, as well as highlighting a lot of other BookTubers with a range of beautiful thumbnail styles. Now, Kayla is a professional graphic designer and her understanding of design theory and ease with design software goes way beyond me, but I also learned a lot, and so can you.

There are a million articles with design advice out there. Have fun!

Photos

Everything integrates with Unsplash these days, and You Can Tell. Unsplash painted the internet in moody photos of landscapes and bicycles, and this Unsplash cofounder is right that they saved us from flavorless iStockPhoto and we are eternally grateful — and aware that your site can look exactly like the Unsplash site itself if you’re not careful. If you want something a little different, though, here’s a list of alternative sources for free stock, and another one. New Old Stock is all public domain vintage photos, which could be such a vibe. In February 2020, the Smithsonian released millions of their own images to the public domain which has made some of the coolest photos and illustrations available for promoting your books. You can have fun with this.

Don’t mess around with images you found on Google Images. I’ve seen more than one expensive stock photography site get their lawyers involved, and it’s just not the worth the hassle. Keep your mood boards on Pinterest, where they’ll just take your copyrighted photos down instead of demanding thousands of dollars.

Accessibility

Online accessibility is, at its core, making sure that disabled visitors are able to use your site as easily as anyone. There are a lot of guidelines you could follow, and it’s not a snap to comply with any of them. Moreover, in the words of a Vijay Mathew of Howlround Theatre Commons (a client at my day job), who wrote a fantastic essay on their efforts to build an accessible site: “compliance is not the same thing as inclusion … It is quite possible to make a website that technically passes all the accessibility tests but that still is terribly difficult for a person to use.” For primary source, I love this list of the five most annoying things a blind person faces across the internet.

I say all this to challenge you, not discourage you. Accessibility is a valuable goal for your website, and something you’re never done with. I put this here instead of on the platforms comparison because accessibility is much more in your hands day-to-day than anything your site build can do for you.

While neither WordPress, nor Squarespace, nor any site platform promises accessibility compliance — and, for the same reason WordPress can’t promise security, it can’t promise accessibility compliance — you may have an easier go of it with Squarespace. All Squarespace 7.1 templates are actually a single template and that makes it way more likely they’re setting up the site components to comply with accessibility standards. Compare that to a WordPress theme where a developer could, hypothetically, code images not to display the alt text you provide. Squarespace has a guide to making your site more accessible that most, but not exclusively, applies to Squarespace sites, and I have some recommendations of my own.

• Add alt text to your images. Alt text should be written with verbs in their -ing form, to follow a screen reader saying, “An image of your alt text.”

• Body text should be at least 16px — though I personally think that’s tiny. Here’s a good list of Reading Facts, like 9% of people are seeing impaired, meaning their vision can’t be completely corrected with lenses. I’m old as balls and this font is 24px.

• Text on lines longer than about 10 words or 60 characters is hard to follow. Read more on that.

• Both stark white and black backgrounds make it uncomfortable to read long sections of text. Choose mellower colors in between.

• Squarespace will help you make sure accessible colors are paired together, but especially on other platforms, you should check that your text color is easily read on your background color. You can use this contrast checker.

One final pet peeve

Seriously, why is your font so small?