I was having an internal battle of whether I should change how my website looks or not, when my friend Kelly told me that she can help me customize my own site to look just like hers or even better. I'm a big fan of Kelly Summers. When we met a year ago from a speaking engagement that I went to at North Carolina, I was quite surprised that the one who I was talking to about self-publishing over lunch was an Applied Math major. So from then on, we had been exchanging e-mails about the books that we are writing, books that we are reading and the things that we should be doing as self-publishing authors.
Maybe she got tired of the old look of my site which I admit wasn't really that “author-ish”, that's why I decided to change for the better. It didn't cost me much, it only cost me time from writing a few words for the second book of the trilogy titled “Predator” which I am hoping to be published on June.
So if you are also a self-publishing author or a lost soul who's also up for hunting werewolves in their dreams, here were the things that I did to make my site look like this:
- Install a parent theme. In this case, it's the Genesis Framework which costs $59.95 at Studio Press.
- You also need to install a child theme which is compatible with the Genesis Framework. We have so many options for this, but since I loved how the demo of the Novelty Theme looked, I bought it for $75.00 via Restored 316 Designs.
- If you want your website to look like the demo with no sweat, you can pay the developers $147. I realized that this is actually a good deal after all. You can even have everything in the demo personalized according to your own liking for only $297. You can get it here.
Installing the Genesis Framework and the Novelty theme is just the first step of changing how my site looks like. If you're done with is then you can install some plug ins that can help you make your site look “author-ish”. Stay tuned for more of my DIY posts! Meanwhile, I'll be hunting werewolves in my sleep.