By:agjimenezWhile I’d love to be able to say that I came up with the idea for this post all on my own, but credit must be given to Graham Jones, the Internet Psychologist who blogged about this topic over at his website. In his post, Rubbish websites are hugely successful (which was a discussion stemming from a great podcast by Joanna Penn @ The Creative Penn), he posited that you don’t have to have a well-crafted, professional website to attract/retain visitors and gain a wider reading audience — and it’s true. Here’s a snippet:

…Websites do not have to be perfect if you already have a huge offline following and are already well-established. But, if your business is not that well-known, if you are trying to establish yourself, then your website needs to be pretty darn good to stand out amongst the competition. Is that right? Can you get away with a rubbish website if your business is so well-known?

He goes on to discuss the websites of two very popular authors: Stephen King and JK Rowling. Stephen’s is well-designed, very usable and helpful. JK’s on the other hand…well, it certainly looks nice, but I’ll just say I’m not sure how it ever got past usability testing. He finds, however, that even though these websites are at vastly different levels of effectiveness, they share upwards of 100,000 visitors daily.

What we can take away from this is that if you’re King or Rowling, your website could consist of nothing but a picture of a happy face drawn by a three-year-old. It doesn’t matter! When you’ve reached that reputation and following, no one is judging the quality of your work based on your website. However, for most  just starting out in writing, you don’t have that same luxury.

If there’s one thing you can invest in up front that will keep giving and giving, it’s web design. As I mention over on our design services page, if there’s one industry where you can clearly tell expensive/good from cheap/bad, it’s design. Especially when creating for the swift-moving, complicated web, it’s important to have someone on your side that understands all of the nuances that go along with it. Your website is going to be (in a lot of cases) the world’s first look at you, make sure it’s a good one!

Check out Graham’s article, and the source podcast over at The Creative Penn for more information on this topic. I’m planning a post on how to choose a web designer for the future, so stay tuned for that — but before you get that far, check out our earlier posts about branding. If you don’t want to invest in a website just yet, it’s a great first step!