A couple of months ago I bought a website on Wix, mostly because they had an easy way to set up the site so it would look good on all display platforms, PC browsers, tablets and phones. In fact, it had dual editing features, so your display for computer still looks good and takes advantage of the whole screen while the one for phone is set up for the smaller screen. It works really well, for the small percentage of people I assumed actually looked up websites on phones. I set up a sales page, hoping that people who buy my books, or at least some of them, would buy from the website, where I have code on each link that would make the sale through my Amazon Associate account. Eventually I was going to add some of my favorite books from other authors. It’s a great deal, since the author or publisher still gets their full payment.
Then I decided to put a sales page on my WordPress site, the one my blog runs out of. I had gotten the domain names for both, dougdandridge.net for the website, and dougdandridge.com for the blog site. Actually, I could get dougdandridge with just about every dot whatever that I want, since there are no other authors or internet public figures with my name. I already had all the links on a Notepad document for the Wix site, though I had to do some resizing of the images for book covers. I made the book covers all the same size, and all the sales links the same width as the books, so everything would line up perfectly, A couple of days work, a few hours a day, and the Exodus and Deep Dark Well page were done. One more day and I had the sales page for every other book I had ever written. I posted it online, since it had a blog link on every page. It looked beautiful, four covers side to side, sales links beneath each for Amazon.US, Amazon.UK, and Audible where appropriate. Then a fan commented on one of my Facebook posts, and stated that it looked screwed up on his phone. I looked it up, and sure enough, on a phone it had every cover that had been lined up next to each other in a column from top to bottom, followed by a column of five sales links for Amazon.us, then five sales links for Amazon.uk, then the five sales links to Audible. Very confusing to someone browsing on their phone. They might think they are clicking on one sales link, only to go to another book page, and finally be driven to give up. So it was totally screwed up. Then I read online that sixty percent of web browsing and sales take place on mobile devices like tablets and phones. Whoops. It seems like I am behind the times. I prefer the computer and the TV to get my content and entertainment. Yeah, IP providers advertise how you can watch movies on your smart phone, but I want to watch mine on wide screen UHD TVs with sound systems. I want to play my games on my thirty two inch curved monitor. I want to shop on my office computer. Well, it seems like I’m not like the majority, and if I want to get the contacts, I need to set it up so people can easily browse on their smart phones while they ignore their friends at the bar or restaurant.
Now I am working on trying to get a page up that will not only look good on a PC browser, but also be useful on a phone. Which is not easy. And the WordPress editor is not the easiest thing to use to manipulate images and text together. A lot of cussing going on in my office, the cats avoiding me. I asked for help on Facebook, which, yes, I also look at on one of the three large screen monitors of my computer, dinosaur that I am. And I got several answers. Now I am going to try out Divi, which is supposed to allow you to fill up the screens of both computers and phones, and even tablets in between. You have to keep up with the world if you want to make it. I started out by learning everything I could about marketing books online, and it paid off in becoming a full time writer, and in selling over two hundred thousand books. Then I got lazy, since everything seemed to be going so well on its own. Still putting out the books, but cutting back on the marketing. I found to my horror that I had sites, my Amazon author’s page, my Goodread’s page, even the about page on my blog, that hadn’t been touched in four years. So here I go, rolling up the sleeves and digging in with the marketing once again.