If anyone hears your name, or hears about a book you have written, they are going to Google you. It's the modern way. it is vital you have an on-line presence and that you are in control of some of it. A domain with the name of your publishing house is also important, an address that reads www.yourpublishing house.xxx is more prestigious that www.blogspot/wordpress/whomever.yourp... and also much shorter.
Some people were against me choosing a .co domain and others thought just having footsteps and not footstepspress was confusing me with a dance company. I took the view the shorter the better. If anyone mentions us to anyone else saying its 'footsteps.co' is almost memorable enough not to have to write down.
Publishing templates.
Themeforest and a few others do templates for publishing houses. Most of these need to be populated on your own machine and synchronised online with your host. I chose Templatic's theme for books and it lasted me a good six months. It didn't have enough options for me to add links to the sites the book were on sale and only allowed one currency.
I now run a Drupal site, Drupal is hard to learn but free to use and Drupal 8 due out this year is going to easier for beginners. There are any free templates and if you get the hang of it, you have a lot more power to develop pages than in Wordpress.
That said a good many hosts now load up Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress for you and if you but a template or use a free one all you have to do is load it up and off you go.
My advice:
Artists tell me that all painting is about how you show and control light on the canvas. Designers tell me for webpages and books, it is all about how to control white-space. Less is more. Our site is minimal with some fancy elements not used. Our new site will have more options for navigation and better gallery control for the artists but the pages will never be overloaded. Readers are discerning folk, endless advertising to them puts them off. It does me.
Some people were against me choosing a .co domain and others thought just having footsteps and not footstepspress was confusing me with a dance company. I took the view the shorter the better. If anyone mentions us to anyone else saying its 'footsteps.co' is almost memorable enough not to have to write down.
Publishing templates.
Themeforest and a few others do templates for publishing houses. Most of these need to be populated on your own machine and synchronised online with your host. I chose Templatic's theme for books and it lasted me a good six months. It didn't have enough options for me to add links to the sites the book were on sale and only allowed one currency.
I now run a Drupal site, Drupal is hard to learn but free to use and Drupal 8 due out this year is going to easier for beginners. There are any free templates and if you get the hang of it, you have a lot more power to develop pages than in Wordpress.
That said a good many hosts now load up Drupal or Joomla or Wordpress for you and if you but a template or use a free one all you have to do is load it up and off you go.
My advice:
Artists tell me that all painting is about how you show and control light on the canvas. Designers tell me for webpages and books, it is all about how to control white-space. Less is more. Our site is minimal with some fancy elements not used. Our new site will have more options for navigation and better gallery control for the artists but the pages will never be overloaded. Readers are discerning folk, endless advertising to them puts them off. It does me.
Our first theme:
http://templatic.com/app-themes/publi...
our present site
http://www.footsteps.co