Working on a website

A website? What the heck?!

Don't panic - I know you pop in here to catch up with me and see what I've been up to and that's not going to change! Squidge's Scribbles will remain the blog of Katherine Hetzel, author, for the foreseeable future.

But I've been wondering whether to create a website as well - to act as both a direct selling platform AND be somewhere that children (assuming they like my stories and want more!) can drop by...

I've been playing on Wix and have come up with something reasonably basic that I like. It's not live yet and certainly won't be until I run it past a few more folk who know a lot more about websites than me! (Talk about a steep learning curve - I thought setting up the blog was complicated at first, but if you'd seen me trying to insert a picture onto a web page that didn't keep cropping whenever I tried to resize it... )

I've done my research - looked at lots of children's author websites and the sort of thing they offer to the browser. 'Course some of them are all-singing, all dancing and have animated pictures and games and music and everything else that I wouldn't have a clue how to add. My website's going to be a bit simple by comparison - like this blog.

And me.

So far, I've planned pages on bio, books, news and contact details - and a link to this blog of course. But I'm also wondering whether to offer samples of stories, competitions, author visits...

Thing is - do I really need it? Is a website just another thing to take up my writing time when I could (probably) add similar things to my blog? The only real advantage I can see at the moment is that as my name becomes more familiar as an author, it would be easier to find ME on the world wide web; 'Squidge's Scribbles' probably isn't the first thing you'd think of if you wanted to search out the books and writing of Katherine Hetzel.

What do you reckon? Is it worth the extra effort to advertise myself that bit more? Or should I continue to build a platform from the Scribbles?

I'd be interested to know what you think...