Overcoming Website Anxiety

Freaked. Confused. Overwhelmed. And totally panicked with sweaty palms and an erratic heartbeat. Yes, the idea of having my author website built felt an awful lot like death. It wasn’t a pretty thing to witness...ask my poor husband.

First, I should point out that I am far from being technically savvy. The idea alone of taking on such a prodigious technology based project made my stomach churn to near sickness and my head swirl with anxiety and fear. I couldn’t escape the elephant sized pressure that weighed down on me. No matter how many times I heard “It’s no biggie” or “Once you learn how to do it, it will be a breeze” I still didn’t think I could do it. Let’s face it - I was terrified I’d fail.

Since I was struggling so much with where to begin and how to do any of it, I'd gone as far as calling companies that specialized in website design and development. I was blown away by the cost of the services provided by some of these companies. (Let’s just say that I rolled my eyes a lot.) As an author just starting out I didn't need a lot of coding, multi-layers, and fancy design work. What I needed was someone to teach me what went into building a site and show me how to manage it. Basically, give me the tools to do it myself without all that scary computer jargon attached to it.

Unfortunately, fear beat me at this point and after months of research I finally gave up and said I'd get to it again when I wasn't so overwhelmed and frustrated...AND that meant never. So for the last three years I have gone without an author webpage and strictly used social media sites to chat with readers and promote my books.

Nearly a year later, I came across a web service that provided templates for authors and other creative industries with easy to follow tools so that I could ultimately build my own page and they would host the site and lend support when needed. Who knew sites like this existed? Apparently a lot of people. Sadly, I wasn't one of them.

Until now…

I loved this idea. I now had the ability to create my own layout using a pre-designed template, giving me complete control to arrange each page as I wanted. PERFECT!

After a few days of working on creating my site, I was ready to launch my author webpage. Who would’ve guessed that something I once feared would end up becoming so much fun to experience.

Now I can gladly say that I didn’t let a little thing like fear and a near heart attack stop me from doing something pretty cool.