As a published author, I firmly believe a good, well-designed website is a must. It’s a home base of sorts, where we dazzle our visitors with the brilliance of our content, and compel them to buy our books.
All our social media channels – Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, what have you – lead back to this home base.
When it comes to building this website, we have two basic options to choose from.
The obvious first choice is to hire a professional web designer to build a website from scratch, according to your preferences and tastes. But this can be time consuming and very expensive (think several hundred dollars to thousands).
You’ll also need to create a fruitful connection with the designer to ensure a quality outcome, as you ease your way into the seemingly endless revisions, tweaks, delays and – yes, conflicts in personal preferences and styles.
I’ve worked with several web designers. My current site ended up costing me around $5,000 in private design costs. And that’s after I fired my first designer, losing a large sum of money in the process.
Thankfully, there is another path to choose from: a pre-built web theme.
These are pre-built websites that can be customized by any novice user. Simply choose a theme, and you are good to go. The downside, however, is exactly that they are pre-designed, and it can be quite difficult to customize them. Also, choosing from the thousands of pre-made WordPress themes for writers can be a daunting task.
This is where the Headway Theme comes into the picture.
It is a relatively new, unique concept of “preset web themes” currently available on the market, perfectly suited for writers or journalists.
You can build, customize, change colors, fonts, and any feature you can think of at a touch of a button. Quite literally so.
Customizing your website has indeed never been more flexible and fast. The theme features a powerful editor called “Headway Visual Editor”, which you use to give that unique look to your website consistent with your branding, the sort of audience you’re trying to attract, and the theme of your books. With this theme you can show your personality, your passion and your style.
Here’s a cool example of a website designed using Headway:
The Headway Grid
This feature allows you to build any layout you can think up. Let your imagination run wild and create the website of your dreams, using simple techniques and functions. You will no longer be constrained by strict layout systems and limited options or functions.
You can layout you website as you want, with windows of different sizes, shapes and locations. Whenever you want to add a new column, row or a mixture of various elements, simply use the appropriate function of drag and drop and … you are good to go.
Even adding a widget is very simple with their new widget block function.
This translates into a flexibility that is absolutely staggering, resulting in endless ways to create your website for your specific needs.
The Block System
Setting your own header, navigation bar or footer with the “Block System” feature of the Headway theme is very. Just draw the blocks you want and enjoy the outcome. If you want to use specific PHP or Java code for the blocks (assuming you know what these are), simply insert them in the dialogue box and enjoy the changes.
It’s that simple.
Layout Selector
The Headway’s “Layout Selector” lets you choose and create specific page designs either by a class of pages, or for each page individually.
The Headway theme lets you have any type of page design, mix various designs and even various designs for posts. This ensures ultimate customization possibilities and will surely result in a truly personal website.
Your website will not be similar to any other website and, most importantly, will help you stand out of the crowd.
Want to post a block of text, such as chapter? Easy. Want to add a photo gallery? Not difficult at all. Want to display the latest user comments? You’re a few clicks away.
Search engine optimization
Every website, no matter how great or colorful it is, has to be found easily on the web.
The Headway theme is fully prepared for search engine optimization plugins and it comes preset with a handful of SEO features.
Title tags or meta descriptions are easy to set even for a novice. Also, the theme features a powerful search tool, perfect for large websites.
Mobile optimization
Mobile websites are getting more popular each day and every respectable website has a mobile version.
The Headway theme is fully responsive, meaning it can display on both mobile and normal devices perfectly. While designing the website, you can choose to turn off the responsive grid, if you want just a simple desktop version. When working at a mobile version for your website, you can choose to eliminate certain blocks or columns, for a better compatibility with mobile devices.
A Negative?
There’s clearly a learning curve involved. While you can begin and setup your first site with a simple drag-and-drop, there will come the time when you’ll want to use the more advanced features.
This is the time when you may find yourself hanging out at the Headway’s excellent support forums.
Customer reviews: What do the other users think of the Headway theme?
Dave Thackeray uses the Headway theme for his website and is fascinated by the endless possibilities it offers for writers. He seems to enjoy the simple design and the drag and drop feature, as well as the technical support and the community.
Leo Immerzeel seems amazed by the Headway’s theme flexibility and customization options. He praises the theme for its designing capabilities, intuitive features and its Live CSS editor. The theme effectively makes you feel like a true web designer, he says, and it is great fun, too.
