Around 15 people attended April’s meeting to watch Zita Podany’s demonstration of how to create a website without stress, cash, terror, or disaster. But first Judy, in the absence of Steve, announced the results of April’s Dazzle Me contest.

Contests

1. TOP FINISHER (and future contest host) – Michael Fryer for “Confessions of Dracula’s Houskeeper”
2. NEXT – Lyndsay Docherty for “Dazzled By My Double”
3. NEXT – Gary Romans for “The Bedazzled Music Circus”

OTHER CONTEST ENTRIES/AUTHORS:

• “A Charmer” by Peter Letts
• “Dazzled by Ireland” Poem by Jean Harkin
• “Dazzled Out of Darkness” Poem by Lyndsay Docherty
• “Faith, Science, and Law” Poem by Sheila Deeth
• “Life is Full of Surprises” By Jessie Collins
• “Rules of the Road” By Sheila Deeth
• “Sweet Romance” Poem by Judy Beaston
• “The Coal Boy” By Robin Layne
• “Too Good To Be True” By Karin Krafft

UPCOMING CONTESTS:

• May – Entries must be received by Sunday, May 1^st – THAT IS NEXT SUNDAY!!!
  • THEME: REACH FOR THE SKIES
• June – Entries accepted from May 2^nd until June 5^th
  • THEME: DREAMS AND ASPIRATIONS
• July — Entries accepted from June 6th until July 3^rd
  • THEME: ONLY TIME WILL TELL

All have a 1200 word limit, any genre (but be kind), and send entries to contest @ portlandwritersmill . org, by the end of NEXT SUNDAY if you’re entering the current contest. (Time is short because our meeting was on the 4^th Sunday instead of the 3^rd this month.)

Go to https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/may-2022-contest-page/ for more information on May’s contest, and to https://www.portlandwritersmill.org/contests/upcoming-contests/ for upcoming contests.

In-Person Meetings

Alice (our librarian) kept us informed of where the library is with plans to allow hybrid (inperson & online) meetings. They will need another computer (as two computers would be required – one to manage screen-sharing and the other to let online members in and monitor the chat). And they will also need a more specialized microphone that can pick up voices from further away. The library’s IT department are responsible for this, and Zita said they are welcome to ask her for advice.

Alice hopes we will find a second volunteer (besides Sheila) to help at meetings. Sheila hopes we might find two volunteers, to increase the likelihood of at least two people being available at every meeting. One volunteer would need to be present inperson. The other could be either inperson or online. Please REPLY TO THIS EMAIL to volunteer.

The volunteer may be asked to become an official library volunteer. Sheila now has her badge and number, so she is official (at last!).

We hope to start hybrid meetings in July, so May and June’s meetings will continue to be online.

At this point, Sheila handed the meeting over to Zita who proceeded to create a website in front of us in just over an hour!

How to Create a Website

Zita has tried out many different ways of creating a website – Weebly, Wix, WordPress, etc – but says the most intuitive approach is to use Weebly. So, if you would like something quick and easy to use, and free, go to https://www.weebly.com/ and sign in/sign up.

Signup

You’ll need your name, an email address (don’t forget what address you use), and a password (try not to forget that either). When you sign in you will be taken to your

Dashboard

Here you click on + to add a site. You can add a site with or without an online store, but if you’re including an online store you might want to upgrade to a paid site with better security. You can always change your mind later, so start with a simple site without an online store.

Template

You’ll be presented with lots of templates for imaginary sites. What should you look for in choosing your template?

• Don’t look at the pictures – you’re going to upload your own pictures
• Look at the fonts – what fonts look good to you
• Look at the colors – when you choose your template, you will be locked in to the template’s colors for various tasks (not for everything)
• Look at where the site name is placed – top left, top center…
• And look at the navigation bar – how short or long is it, and how well does that fit in with the sort of pages you want to allow users to navigate to? (If you have too many pages, some might get hidden under a “more” button at the end of the navigation bar. Users prefer not to have to click on “more.”)
• Ignore templates where the navigation bar is hidden behind three small lines. Users tend not to like these.

When you’ve chosen your template, it’s time to start editing.

Domain Name

The first thing you have to do is select your domain name. For a free site, your web address will be something like www.sheiladeeth.weebly.com, and your site is a “subdomain” of weebly. You can change this later and pay for a more intuitive name like www.sheiladeethbooks.com, but there’s nothing wrong with the free site. (When you strike it rich through your writing, then the honorable thing is to pay.) The most important thing is, don’t forget what you chose!

Pre-Created Pages

Weebly “helps” you by reloading the editor now with pre-created pages – the ones that belong to the template you chose. You can just remove bits from the pages, one by one, by clicking on them and clicking the x at the top right. But it’s better to remove the pages, or you risk having an unexpected picture of a puppy sitting around on your site forever.

Look at the options at the top of your screen. “Build” helps you build a page. “Pages” helps you add, reorder, or remove pages, so this is where you’ll delete those unwanted pages. You have to have at least one page remaining though so:

• Click on Pages
• Click on each page that’s not Home and click “delete.”
• Click on the Home page and rename it to “xhome”
• Click on + to add a page, make it a standard page, and call it Home
• Click on xhome and delete it.

Different types of page

When you add a page:

• You have to name your page
• You have to choose what type of page
  • Standard is the most common one
  • Blog lets you run a blog from your site. If you don’t already have a blog, Weebly’s blog is fairly simple, and a great way to start one.
  • Catalog – more useful if you’re selling things from your site
  • External – if you’re linking to stuff that you have elsewhere on the internet
  • Non-clickable – we’ll look at this later
• For a Standard page, you also have to choose
  • Splash page – Looks great but takes up lots of space
  • Large header – You can upload a picture for the header, but bear in mind readers might not want to scroll down the page to read what’s below the header. How are you going to grab their attention if they have to scroll?
  • Small header – well, it’s smaller
  • No header – then the reader just has the navigation bar above the stuff you want them to read.
  • You can set the visibility too, so you can keep some pages hidden

Title

Click and drag “blocks” from the left hand menu onto your new page.

• Start with a title. Drag the Title block onto your page.
• See the little menu bar that pops up with plus and minus, Bold, Italic, Underline, links, all those good things? Start clicking + till your title’s the right size (and remember how many clicks it took – you’ll do this lots of times).
• So, now you have a page that says “My Site.” Change it to say something more useful, but don’t use “Welcome to my site.” Readers wouldn’t be here unless they know they were welcome. Try “Famous Author” and fill in your name. If you see it often enough you’ll believe it won’t you?

Text

The page still needs some text of course – something for visitors to read. Drag a text block under the title. This is where you write your SHORT elevator pitch. Readers should finish reading it in about 10 seconds (or less), so don’t write an essay. The “Who am I?” essay belongs on the about me page.

Your home page might be a good place for a slideshow, which we’ll look at later. But look at some other websites, see what they have on their home pages, and get inspired.

• Note, you can cut and paste text from a document you’ve prepared earlier, or, if you prefer, you can edit on the fly.
• Remember, you can’t change your fonts now (you chose them when you chose the template) but you can change the size, and you can make text bold, italics, etc.
  • Don’t underline your text. Underline means “link” to computer people. If you underline something that isn’t a link you’ll drive readers crazy.
  • If you’re choosing a color, make sure you choose one with good contrast. You want the text to stand out.
  • Note, your colors may be limited by the template you chose. But if you’re adding images with text printed on them, you still have to think about good choices of color. Your readers may not all have perfect vision. To find out more about color issues, see
    • https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/
    • Color Deficient Vision
    • http://safecolours.rigdenage.com/colours1.html 

Add another page – About Me

Your first page was Home. That’s where visitors will go when they enter your site.

Now make a second page (click “pages” and +) and call it “About Me.” You’ll see it appear in the navigation bar straight away.

Add a title and text just as above. This is where you put the longer essay describing who you are, what you’re writing, why you want people to visit your site, etc. (Again, it’s easiest if you cut and paste this from text you prepared earlier.)

Publish your site

Now it’s time to see how it looks. Click on the “publish” button at the top right. A window pops up showing you a link to the site. Click on the link. Look at the site (it opens on a new tab on your browser on a computer, but test it on your phone as well, or whatever you have available). What do you think?

Then go back to the weebly page in your browser, click the x to close the box with the link in it, and continue editing.

Image

There’s probably a really long splurge of text on that about-me page. This can be somewhat off-putting to readers. You might want to add an image of yourself next to the text, to add “white space” and make it visually more appealing. Drag the “image” block over your page. See the blue line that appears when you hold it above or below the text – that’s telling you where the image will be placed. But you want to put it next to the text, so hold it near the left hand edge and see a blue line there. When you let go of your mouse button, the text slides to one side and the image block appears next to it.

You’ll need to upload your image to the block. And then you’ll want to resize it – instead of the image taking up half the screen, click and drag the blue line between the image and the text, and drag it toward the left. Now your image is smaller. Easy!

There will be lots of white space below your image now. It’s not wasted space. White space is important in making the page look clean and readable. But you can add more images too. Just want to make sure there’s empty space between the images. (You can use spacer blocks to do this.)

If you have books, you might add pictures of their covers here. But better still, you might want to link the pictures to wherever your reader can buy the books, so we’ll look at editing images next. First though, publish your site again and see how it looks.

Stop and Take a Break

You’ve used three tools – Title, Text, and Image – together with + to create a new page. And already you have a great-looking site! But let’s go further.

Any of those blocks without a flash symbol are free for you to use, and for you to play with. You can always delete things if you don’t want them.

• Blog: Do you have a blog? Maybe now’s the time to start one. It’s not super-sophisticated, but it’s super-easy. Just try it out.
• Spacer: These are empty blocks that let you space things out the way you want them. Try putting one between two images and see how it works.
• Map: Do you really want to show people where you live? Probably not.
• Contact Form: This one is really useful – it lets your readers get in touch with you, without your giving them your real email address. Just make sure you check the address once in a while.
• And then there are slideshows, but we’ll look at those later. First we need to make sure our images aren’t too big or giving away too much.

Edit your Image

You might want to edit your images before uploading them – even if you shrink the picture on the website, it’s still the same size internally and will take just as long to download when people try to visit your site. Plus people can download (steal) your beautiful photographs and turn them into artwork without your permission if you leave the full-size image online. So…

• Aim for, say 150×200 pixels for a small image
• 300 pixels for a medium image
• 800 pixels for a large one (or one you’re using in a slideshow – we’ll get to that)

Enhance your Image

Click on the image to bring up a menu of things you can do to it.

• Captions are good. If your image is a book cover, caption it with the book title.
• Links let the image become a link. Visitors will see a hand when they hover the mouse over your image. When they click on the image, they will go where you sent them.
  • If you’re sending them off your site, you might want the link to open in a “new window.” Otherwise when they close it they’ve left your site and might not come back.
  • If you’re sending them to another page on your site, all the pages are already listed ready for you (which is great when you have several pages).
• Space lets you add more space above or below the image, or align it to the left, right or center of the block.
• Don’t be afraid of “advanced” options. They include:
  • Alt-Text, which makes your site user-friendly. If someone has difficulty seeing and uses a “reader” to speak what’s on the site, the reader will say “image” for an image. Alt-Text tells it to say “image, a book cover with flowers and a dog” etc.
  • Border which lets you put a simple border around your image – you’ll be limited to the colors included in your template.

Test your site again by publishing it. How does it look?

Maybe it’s time to try one more tool on that Home page.

Slideshow

Slideshows can look good on your home page. Try to have images of similar shapes, orientations, and sizes ready on your computer. (Sheila uses the free version of https://www.canva.com/ to create these.) Drag and drop the slideshow block, then click in the block to add images. You can add more later or take some out. You can move the images around till they’re in the order you want. You can change how quickly the images change. Add captions. Add links… Play with it.

You might be able to import a slideshow from elsewhere, maybe by using “embed code,” but we’re looking at the simplest approaches, and uploading your pictures is simple.

Don’t mess with the aspect ratio – let the site choose it depending on what device it’s displaying on.

Then publish and see what you’ve got, again.

NonClickable Menus

When you created your new pages (click on Pages at the top), did you notice all the options? Hover your mouse over them to read more about what they do.

• Standard – that’s what we’ve used
• Blog – great if you want to start a blog
• Category, Product
• External – a page that links straight to somewhere off your site
• NonClickable Menu – a page that will be a subpage of something else. Yes, Weebly lets you create sub-menus, so you don’t have to end up with a long string of pages falling off the end of your navigation bar (or rather, hiding under “more” on your navigation bar. Readers don’t like “more”s)

Make a nonclickable menu page, then look at the left hand side of your screen. Try dragging this new page around. Indent it below another page. Maybe add another page indented below this one. If you’re advertising your writing, for example, you might have a “writing” page, with “poetry,” “essay,” and “fiction” underneath, and maybe “science fiction,” “contemporary fiction,” and “children’s fiction” below “fiction.” (There may be a limit to the number of pages you’re allowed, but play with it.) Then click on the home page and click through those menus in the menu bar to see how it looks. Weebly makes this really easy.

And finally…

LOG OUT

If you’re using a public computer and you forget to lot out, the next person on that computer can edit your site!

Zita very generously offered to do another presentation if we’d like her to, to take us further, or to help us catch up, and she said she might be open to “zoom house calls.” We are incredibly lucky to have her in the Writers’ Mill, and very, very grateful for this demonstration. Thank you Zita.

Next Meeting, ONLINE on ZOOM, will be May 15th.

Don’t forget, next contest DEADLINE is Sunday May 1st.

Happy Writing!