How To Set Up Your First Writer’s Website (A Step-By-Step Guide)
As a writer, the best way for you to earn credibility with potential clients is by showing them a portfolio of your previous work. The number of free ‘portfolio maker’ options online, however, is limited — and such options mostly come with restrictions on storage. If you’re looking to set up a writing portfolio, therefore, the most convenient way is to create a simple website that showcases your work and also tells people about who you are and how they can reach you if they want to work with you. It doesn’t have to be the kind of site that attracts viewers like bees to honey (think Neil Patel’s or Seth Godin’s sites), so don’t worry about fancy designs or SEO rankings — it’s just a place for you to have all your samples organised neatly so that anyone you share the site link with can browse your samples at their leisure.
The most common free website makers used by writers for their portfolios are WordPress, Wix and Weebly. I tried them all out when I was setting up my site, and I have to say that WordPress is the best and easiest option. It has multiple templates to suit every requirement — I chose Lodestar for mine, but there are several others that would work for a writer’s site — and the editing process is highly intuitive. After customising the name, tagline, header image and font, there’s the main part, the one that can make or break your site — the layout.
Now I didn’t want to complicate things with my first site. My requirements were simple. I wanted something that
- Looked sleek
- Was easy to modify
- Allowed me to post samples easily
After a bit of tinkering about, I managed to come up with a format that looked professional and allowed me to present my samples the way I wanted to — under a neat menu that sorted my samples into relevant categories.
In the rest of this post, I’ll outline the process I followed to set up my site. Consider this a starting point, and add whatever you like based on what you need.
Choose a strong tagline.
This will appear under your site name on the header image throughout your site, and should reflect who you are and what your readers and clients can expect from you. I attach below the header image for my site ‘Write To Excel’, featuring my tagline.
Keep the header menu simple.
This is the default menu at the top of your page. It comes with a couple of premade pages, but what you really need when you’re starting out are an About page and a Contact page — the former should contain a couple of paragraphs about yourself, your experience and what you bring to the table when you work with a client; and the latter should feature your email address, your LinkedIn profile link and any other contact detail you may wish to share, like a social media handle or a phone number.
To edit this menu, go to the Customise section and choose Menus. You’ll find one labelled Primary. This is the default menu. Under it you’ll see a custom link to your homepage as well as a premade Contact page.
Click on the Add Items button. You’ll be taken to a list of options, the first of which is pages. To add a new page, simply type the name of your new page into the bar next to the +Add button.
Once you’re done, click the +Add button and then hit Publish on the top right corner.
You can now edit the text of each of your pages on the menu.
Add a Writing Samples menu.
This is the most important part of your site, and one that took me a while to figure out. This process involves making use of widgets to add a second menu in the footer of your site. You can add up to three menus this way, but you’ll just need one right now.
The first step is to create the new menu. Under the Menus option in the Customise section, select Create New Menu. You’ll be redirected to a page like this.
Type in the name of your new menu.
Since you’ll be using a menu widget, you can click on Next as directed.
It’s now time for you to add pages. Each page will represent one category of writing samples. Add as many as you think is relevant, depending on your areas of expertise.
The procedure is the same as for the header menu. Click on Add Items and go to Pages under the menu that pops up.
Type out the names of your new Pages, click +Add and then hit Publish.
Now it’s time to add this menu to the footer of your website. Under the Customise main menu, select Widgets. You’ll be taken to a page like this.
Since you’re just adding one menu, it doesn’t matter which footer you pick. I’ll use Footer 2 for this guide.
When you select +Add A Widget, you’ll see a long list of options. Scroll down to Navigation Menu, and select it.
You’ll come to a screen like this.
Type in the name of your menu in the Title Bar. Under Select Menu, go to the dropdown link and select the new menu you just created.
Once that’s done, you can add more pages if you like. Select Edit Menu and click on Add Items to add pages the same way you did earlier.
Once you’re all done, hit Publish.
This is what the final result looks like on my site. I titled my menu Writing Samples, and added five pages below it.
Add the links to your samples as text.
While I had initially tried to simply copy and paste the links to my articles on each of my pages, for some reason I could only add one link on each page. I thus decided to type out the titles of my samples in the form of a list, and add hyperlinks to the actual samples.
This is what one of my pages looks like in Editor mode. I’ve typed out the names of the articles, along with where they have been published, and added hyperlinks to each name. To do this, simply select the text of the name and click on the Hyperlink article in the tool bar.
It’s the one that looks like a horizontal paperclip.
Add the link to the article in the box that pops up, and click OK.
This is what the final result looks like on the site.
And that’s it — your basic site layout is in place!
Remember, this is just a simple format for you to start with. As you grow and start expanding your services, you can add more elements like downloadable resources or video tutorials. Add social media handles to a separate footer menu, play around with themes and fonts, and add a separate section for the testimonials you acquire — it’s entirely up to you. What I like about this layout is that it allows the visitor to see everything that the site offers on the homepage itself — there’s no guesswork involved. I’ve sent this out to several prospective clients, and the response has been really good, much better than when I was merely sending a bunch of article links by email. So go ahead, sign up on WordPress and create your first writer’s website — believe me when I say, it’s worth it!
