Sandvox Website Profile: “Peter Twohig”

I am a full-time writer and author and I built the website to showcase my novels, the first of which, The Cartographer, is due out on 1 February 2012 and will be published by HarperCollinsPublishers. As to content, I have decided that the landing page will always feature the cover of my latest novel. There will also be an About Peter page, a reviews page called The Buzz, a news page called What's Happening, a Blog and a Contact Peter page. Finally, for each novel there will be an extras collection, in this case it is called Cartographer Extras, and features the following pages: Video Page, Author Interview, The Cartographer's Connections, The Smell Scale, Reading Groups, and The Cartogapher's Territory.

The target audience for the website is the readership or potential readership of my novels and blogs. They may well have come to it through the book itself, through other websites that have been set up by the publisher, through my blog, The voice of fiction, or through my social network pages, eg Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn. They will be readers, potential readers and customers (there will shortly be a Buy my Book pager and pages containing other goodies, eg a Sample Chapter, and a possibly a Missing Book chapter), reviewers, and of course, authors and publishers.

My website will offer to me readers tidbits and extras that they will not get from the novel alone, like the Extras you get on a movie cd. it will also show key players in the profession, especially publishers, that I am a committed player in the industry, and take my marketing seriously. Having hundreds of author websites, I believe mine to be generally superior to most in terms of variety of content, interest and colour.

This website has been around. When I first got my book deal with HarperCollins, I went looking for a platform building software. I actually built three websites, using Sandvox, Rapidweaver and Wordpress, and actually published them to see what they were like to work with. In spite of the other two being excellent software, it was no contest. Just last week, I published the website and told my agent and my publisher and they were thrilled and commented on the professionalism of the website, and of me, which was a double bonus.

My primary criterion was style. As I am a writer of literature, I wanted an elegant look. After looking at a few design templates, I went for the Clean Sheets design as it gave me the most space to contribute my own design elements, and put the focus entirely on the content and not on the website template. In view of the terrific response I will not be changing it (though it would be a simple matter to do so!)

I think I only used one trick and that was to create spaces between objects on the sidebar. I interposed text boxes containing text, which I then made the same colour as the page itself (white) to make the boxes invisible.