Participant Guidelines
The point of this friendly, peer discussion is for you to candidly share whatever you can about your experience related to having your own website, for the benefit of those who are considering launching their own…or those who may be in the middle of it themselves, including:
- why you decided to establish your own site
- what preparation was required
- what initial and ongoing costs to expect
- how much time/effort it takes to manage your site
- what you manage yourself and what you hire out
- what benefits you have realized since you’ve had a site
- how you may be promoting your site
- if you have decided to integrate social media
- what you wish you’d known before you started
- pitfalls to avoid and lessons learned
Thanks to an outage affecting several major data centers, it wasn’t possible to show this website (www.author-izer.com) live during the discussion, which was a bit awkward.
The range of designs and complexity in websites for writers and professional editors was remarkable. Most of the attendees (BAEF members are copyeditors, indexers, fact checkers, proofreaders, and occasionally ghostwriters like me) were non-technical in the extreme.