If you’re a freelance writer, do you need a Website and a blog?
A lot of freelancers I know have both. A Website can be a great showcase for a freelancer’s resume, writing samples and clips, photographs (if they take them), references, recommendations and other marketing materials an editor or book publisher might want to see. But Websites can be time-consuming, intimidating and expensive to create.
A blog is a great medium for a writer to practice their craft. Thanks to blogging sites such as WordPress, TypePad and Blogger.com, getting a blog started can be easy and cheap. But most blogs are set up so new material goes on the front page in reverse chronological order. So if a writer is using a blog as her Website for marketing purposes, editors have to wade through all those blog posts to get to what they really want.
That works for some people, including me. However, I just stumbled upon a post that explains how to put a static front page on a WordPress blog, which means if you want, you can make your blog look like a traditional Website. Thanks to fellow freelancer Carolyn Erickson for bringing it to my attention, and especially to the owner of the Blogging Experiment site for sharing the information, which includes step-by-step instructions.
You can read the instructions here.
Excellent idea! Especially helpful for writers who are just starting out. I’ll pass it on to my WWHW readers. Thanks!
Many sites these days are actually based off of the WordPress script platform. They look like regular sites, but when you look at the source code, you find out they’re actually using WordPress.
It’s a great software!