Tech and Software for Writers

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Writers in the age of high-speed broadband and ubiquitous WiFi can’t just wear their writer hats anymore. You’re expected to have a website, social media profiles, and be able to deliver files in any and every format according to the whims of a client or publisher. That only leaves you with a couple of choices. You can enlist the aid of someone who knows what they’re doing with all things tech, which is a valid and sometimes necessary choice. The other option is that you buckle down, put on your student hat, and get a little bit tech-savvy. To help you out with that, I’ve assembled some resources that can make your life easier and boost your tech cred a little.

Website Tech

It would be lovely if websites were an all-in-one package, but they have a lot of moving parts. Just getting a website up and running means buying a domain, selecting hosting, and then getting the website loaded onto the hosting. Let’s break down the pieces.

Getting a Domain

Your domain is basically the URL that your website uses. So, to get this website, you’d type the URL https://ericdontigney.com into your search bar. The “ericdontigney.com” part is the domain. You buy your domain from a registrar. A registrar is a company that serves as a middleman between domain registries and consumers. On the registrar’s site, you search for a domain that hasn’t been reserved.

Assuming you find one you like, you reserve domain names for a fixed number of years. Reserve periods typically run from 1 to 5 years, although you can get them for as long as 10 years. It’s called reserving — rather than buying — because the domain becomes available to anyone again if you don’t renew it every so often.

The biggest player in the domain name game is GoDaddy. They’ve been in the business for decades, which makes them a reliable service that isn’t likely to go belly up on you at a moment’s notice. The only caveat with Godaddy is that its pricing isn’t always great, particularly for hosting service add-ons.

Other major players in the registrar game include:

Network SolutionsIONOS

You should look at a few registrars for comparison pricing, as well as to see if they offer bundled service packages you might want.

Web Hosting

Next up is web hosting. While the registrar provides you with the domain, the hosting company provides server space for your website files and gives Internet users access to those files. Fun fact: when a website goes down, it’s almost always a problem with the hosting service, rather than the company or individual who runs the site.

Web hosting is a little more complicated than looks on the surface. Most hosting companies offer tiers of service. Not shockingly, pricier tiers offer bells and whistles you don’t get at cheaper tiers. Of course, most of those bells and whistles don’t make much difference until you’re seeing major traffic on your website.

Shared Hosting

For the entry-level website, which is most websites, you’ll likely want a shared hosting plan. With shared hosting, the company puts a lot of websites onto one server. All the websites share that server’s resources, such as bandwidth. That means that if one of the other sites on the servers sees a huge surge in traffic, it can slow down your website. These service tiers are typically the most affordable options. As a general rule, you should start here. It’s a cost-effective solution that gets your website online.

VPS

A VPS or virtual private server tier is the midway point between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. With VPS, the hosting service still keeps more than one website on a server, but they partition off your website from the rest. They use software to make it seem like your site is operating on its own server. Your virtual server gets assigned resources that other sites on the server can use up. That means your site won’t get slowed down by anything happening on other sites sharing that same server. If you do see major traffic to your site that impacts things like loading speed, this is probably the next step for your hosting needs.

Dedicated Hosting

With dedicated hosting, your website gets an entire server all to itself. That means you get all of the resources the server can provide. It also lets you configure the server for your purposes. For most writers, though, that level of control isn’t necessary or even helpful. Dedicated hosting is primarily meant for businesses that use in-house IT departments and have special needs. Dedicated hosting is the most expensive tier.

Cloud Hosting

Cloud hosting is all the rage right now, but it doesn’t change much for the writer looking to put up a website. In most cases, you see the exact same kind of tiered service offerings and pricing. Cloud hosting may offer a slight reliability and speed advantage over non-cloud hosting.

Hosting Services

There are many reliable hosting services out there, such as:

HostGatorBlueHostHostingerDreamHost

Again, you’ll want to shop around a little. Hosting services will often run discounts and sales you can take advantage of to shave a little off the top.

FTP Tools

While increasingly less necessary for most website owners, FTP or file transfer protocol tools allow you to upload files directly from your computer to your website or hosting server. The one time you need these tools is when you get a custom-made website from a developer. The developer will give you files, but it’s usually on you to upload them to the server.

There are a handful of commonly used FTP tools:

FileZilla (this is popular because it’s free and works on Windows, Mac, and Linux systems)Cyberduck (Windows, Mac)Free FTP (Windows only)

Since you can get free versions of all of these, it’s mostly about looking at the interface and deciding which one you like best.

Website Creation

You have a few options when it comes to building your website. Each choice comes with particular strengths and weaknesses.

WYSIWYG Site Builders

Some people strongly prefer what-you-see-is-what-you-get site builders. As a general rule, these site builders provide you with a range of preset options. For example, you get a selection of themes that decide the overall appearance of your site. They typically provide you with plugin options that enable things like an e-commerce shop, which is helpful if you want to sell branded merchandise or signed copies of a book.

You typically assemble your website using a drag-and-drop system where what you see is literally what you get.

While WYSIWYG site builders provide a quick-and-dirty choice for getting your website up, they come with some serious pitfalls. You’re stuck with the visual options they provide in most cases. Those options can prove very limited, which hampers creating a site that conforms with your vision. In most cases, you must build and host your site on their servers. Sites that offer WYSIWYG site builders and host websites often make it very, very difficult to export your site to a different hosting service. That makes your life difficult if or when you decide to take firmer control over your website. You also pay a premium for these services in the form of monthly subscription fees, which are typically more than you’d pay for hosting.

For someone looking for a fast, all-in-one solution to their website problem, though, these services can get the job done. A few of the popular options include:

WixSquarespaceWeebly

Of the options, Wix typically ranks best for its overall experience and service. Weebly offers a decent free plan, though you’ll pay for more advanced features and services. Squarespace caters almost exclusively to e-commerce businesses, rather than a general customer base of website owners.

Content Management Systems

The simplest and usually most cost-effective option for writers looking to get a website up and running is a content management system. There are a few popular content management systems, but WordPress is hands down the most popular choice. A little over 40% of all websites use it.

One of the big reasons is that WordPress is free to use. Most hosting companies even offer single-click installation of the core software. Of course, its popularity goes beyond the simple matter of it being free.

WordPress is very user-friendly with an intuitive interface. You can customize WordPress sites for almost any purpose. Countless free themes that let you adjust the look and feel of your website. If you want a very specific look, you can buy themes that will let you achieve that look. You can even hire someone to write a custom theme for you.

WordPress also supports a vast constellation of plugins (some free and some paid) that let you do almost anything you want on your site. That ranges from extra security measures straight through to e-commerce options and search engine optimization tools.

That said, there are other options, such as Drupal and Joomla. As a general rule, Drupal is not user-friendly and almost always requires the help of a professional developer to get a visually pleasing website. While not as technically complex as Drupal, Joomla is aimed more at people with IT experience in terms of configuring servers. Some hosting services support single-click installation of Drupal and Joomla, but not all of them do.

You can check out the options here:

WordPressDrupalJoomla

For an entry-level writer’s site, WordPress is likely your best option in terms of content management systems and site creation overall.

Custom Site

The other option is a purely custom site. Unless you have some deeply compelling reason to believe you need a custom site, it’s generally a bad idea. For one, custom sites are expensive. A basic custom site that’s worth having willing run you about $5000 at the bottom end. Typically, customer website design runs in the $10,000 and up range. You can see a sample breakdown of custom site development costs over here.

On top of that, website visual trends change over time. That site you get designed today will likely look out of date in 3 years. The problem is that getting a new look for your site means overhauling the whole site. While it probably won’t cost you as much for the overhaul, it will still cost a lot.

Then there is the matter of security. A good website has security built-in from the ground up. Those security measures become less effective as time passes. Keeping those security measures up-to-date often means shelling out a monthly maintenance fee to the web design firm you used to build the site.

The big takeaway here is that custom sites are for people with deep pockets.

Website Management

Once you get your website up and running, there is still that pesky problem of managing your website.

Control Panels

Website hosting services use a couple of control panels to help you manage your website. That can mean everything from installing third-party services to creating domain-based email addresses, adjusting account settings, and domain management. There are a few big players in the control panel game, such as cPanel, Plesk, and hPanel. Odds are good that you’ll deal with either cPanel or Plesk on most hosting services.

If you’ve never worked with a control panel before, there are many tutorials available. You can find tutorials from cPanel and Plesk at the following links:

cPanel tutorials

Plesk tutorials

You can also find helpful tutorials on YouTube and tech sites.

Moving WordPress Sites

So, let’s say that you put up a WordPress site, but you’ve decided to move that site to a different domain. You don’t want to start from scratch, especially if you’ve been posting content for years. So, what do you do?

You can head over here for a solid tutorial about moving a WordPress site from one domain to another. The tutorial includes links to several helpful tools that you’ll use in the process.

DIY Website Repairs/Alterations

Not every website problem demands the help of a professional web programmer. It only seems that way because you don’t understand anything about coding. In fact, many alterations that people want to make on their websites require only the most rudimentary understanding of web programming and web design. On top of that, you don’t even need to pay to learn basic coding skills. Here are some sites that will teach you coding basics for free:

FreeCodeCampCodecademyedXKhan Academy

If you’re wondering what you should learn, focus on web essential languages like HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Many of these resources will offer way more training than you need, but you might find out you like coding.

Content Creation

The exact tools you want for content creation depend a lot on whether you’re writing fiction or doing non-fiction content creation as a freelancer. Let’s start with non-fiction content creation for freelancers.

Grammarly

Grammarly is a lot like the grammar checker and spellchecker in Microsoft Word, except it works much, much better. It’s not perfect, by any means, and it can get confused with complex sentences. Even so, it’s a great tool that helps you find and correct basic typos and grammar errors. You can get that basic level of service for free. It works as an extension on Firefox and Chrome, which is very helpful if you work in web-based text editors. There is even an MS Word plugin if you like the Grammarly results.

There is a paid version that will identify advanced style and grammar issues if you want an extra dose of help.

Copyscape

Most writers live in a semi-permanent state of mortal dread when it comes to plagiarism. It can and will get you fired from most writing gigs. Fortunately, Copyscape exists. Even better, it’s the go-to tool that most businesses use to check content before they publish it. You can see the same results your clients will. On the off chance that you have plagiarized something, it gives you a chance to fix the problem before you send content winging off to clients. Plus, it costs pennies for most web content-length articles and blog posts. It’s some of the cheapest and most effective peace of mind you can get.

File Conversion

From time to time, you’ll run across a client who only wants files in a specific format. You can realistically have every possible piece of software on your computer. What you can do is make use of the many file conversion websites out there to turn your word document into whatever format the client wants. As a bonus, most conversion sites will also convert other file formats, such as audio, video, and image files should you need the help.

A few possibilities include:

Online-convert.comFreeFileConvertConvertFiles

You can also find a number of paid services that offer similar conversion services, but may also offer services like cloud storage and high-speed downloads.

Content Creation Fiction

Tools like Grammarly can also help with fiction writing, but it’s not particularly built to deal with quirks like dialects in dialogue. Instead, consider some of these options.

ProWritingAid

ProWritingAid is a bit like Grammarly, except juiced up and made for novelists. It’ll give you grammar and style suggestions while you write. It will also help you identify issues like overused words, readability, consistency, punctuation, pacing, and so much more.

There is a free version, but you get the good features with a paid subscription.

Scrivener

Scrivener is a dedicated word-processing program built to accommodate the specific needs of novelists and other fiction writers. You get a corkboard for notes or ideas. There is a built-in outlining tool. There is even a feature for setting and tracking targets, such as word counts.

Scrivener isn’t a flawless piece of software. One of the common complaints is that there is a steep learning curve to understand all the features. People who do master the software, though, sing its praises. You can get a free trial version or make a one-time license purchase. It’s available for Windows, Mac, and iOS, although the Windows version has persistently lagged behind the Mac version for feature updates.

Kindle Create

When it comes to self-publishing on Amazon, you want the Kindle Create software. It’s free, user-friendly, and will generate an ebook file that Amazon won’t kick back at you for no apparent reasons. Just as importantly, it comes with a load of built-in features for formatting your book in a Kindle-friendly way, such as an automated table of contents linking inside the book.

Calibre

Of course, Kindle files aren’t the only kind of ebook files out there. For all of those other formats, such as EPUB and MOBI, you have Calibre. Calibre can help you take that Word document and translate it into pretty much every major ebook format out there. It also tolerates a wide variety of input formats fairly well, including PDF, HTML, ODT, and PML.

Know of any other helpful bits of tech or software that writers should know about? Leave a comment below and tell us about it!

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