I finally moved my website from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. The difference between .com and .org is that the site is self-hosted and I can install email optins.
Website Design
The website got finished thanks to Shannon Mattern who I saw speak at the Rebel Boss Virtual Summit in October 2020 (organised and hosted by Eden Fried). Shannon offers courses in DIY Web Design and Marketing training for Entrepreneurs.
I did the free DIY Web Design Course called the ‘5 Day Website Challenge’ – you can take as long as I did or do it in 5 days or less if you’re super-fast.
In videos, Shannon takes you step by step through domain, hosting with Bluehost, setting up and using WordPress, your business email address setup and configured – and that’s Day 1. Day 2 to Day 5 goes through Plugins, Settings, Branding, Page Design, Email Optin and Going Live. And to save time you can purchase ready-made and optimised templates to get it all done faster.
Brand Colours
To create brand colours, I used one of my paintings and Adobe Colour Wheel. You upload a photo of the painting and Adobe Color extracts a theme. I choose a selection of complementary colours to generate a colour palette.
I created a Mood Board using some of the colours to see how they compared to the old website’s look and picked the ones I loved. They’re not the same but I love them. I’ll use those colours as Brand colours on the website, social media, and where needed throughout my Author Platform.
Image of Mood Board colours
The Logo and Favicon were designed in Canva. If you’re not using Canva already, it’s an online graphic design platform. You can use it to design social media graphics, presentations, posters, cards, logo, and all sorts of visual content.
Right, I’m off. Back to editing that novel.
