For the last few weeks, I have been busy setting up several new websites – two for selling my new book and one for the re-launch of my Saint in the Family blog. Of course it is my hope that all these sites will become hugely popular resulting in millions of copies of my new book sold and thousands of people following my blog. I am however a bit more down to earth then that and do realise that these results are not very likely to happen, at least not in the first month… ;-)

Setting up and updating a website or blog is a lot of work and seriously, not for the fainthearted. The fact simply is that if you don’t want to spend time writing new blog posts or updating your site, visitor numbers will soon dwindle and disappear. You need stamina and determination just to keep it up, especially when the newly installed Google analytics show that you only have about three visitors a week.

Wanting to make all my websites the best I could make them, I was lucky to come across a blog post on the Travel Writers Exchange about a recently launched ebook called Why your website sucks, and how to fix it. Intrigued, I decided to buy it, with the result that for the last 24 hours, I have emerged myself in the pages of the book and started doing the ‘homework’ it gives at the end of each chapter. Even in this short period of time I have already learned a lot.

Priorities are still of an essence and therefore I have decided to keep designing (and re-designing) the two sites that will primarily sell my new book. One is a site of my publishing company, FTK Publishing, which will have a web shop where all three of my books will be sold, the other a site dedicated solely to the sale of my new book.

Once these two sites are properly set up (and the new book launched!) I will redesign my Maria Staal site and set my Saint in the Family blog up on its own website.

I could never have thought when I set up my Maria Staal website and blog, that I would have three more websites only six months later. Amazing how things evolve in such a short space of time.