One of my goals for this years is to streamline my web presence, and I'm looking for a web designer to help me with that. Has anyone worked with a web designer who did really good work? Alternatively, do you have any author websites you think are doing a great job? (I can contact the authors to ask for references) Thanks for any suggestions!
These guys have just revamped our website at work: http://www.philosophydesign.com/ Although this was a corporate commission, we didn't have a big budget at all and they've done a great job. I'll PM you the website so you can check out their work.
I plan to handle my own webdesign needs when the time comes, so this isn't something I've researched. Off the top of my head, though, I think Patrick Rothfuss' web presence is great. Besides Robert J Sawyer (who I believe handles his own site), Rothfuss is the most prominently featured author in all my news feeds. http://www.patrickrothfuss.com/
I did my own at www.lewis-mcintyre.com, using Squarespace @ $100/year including domain name. They were extremely helpful my getting my very first site up and operating. I kept it simple and did not find it difficult, other than initially mastering the terminology. Consider rolling your own with them.
Your site isn't loading for me... 504 gateway timeout the first time I tried, then a 500 internal server error.
I like Alyssa Harad's site (http://alyssaharad.com) --though I must say that it's one of the few author websites I've ever looked at, so mine isn't that informed an opinion. (I got there through the perfume blog path, rather than the "book" path.) Apparently it was created by a company named WebsyDaisy.
Alyssa's is a 'wordpress theme' – taken and tweaked I figure by her web designer. I like it, it's clean and the colour scheme+lines of visual grammar match the book that's being promoted. I'd tweak it if it were mine (not much) by softening or radiusing some of the corners and I'd look to playing with the typography by losing the prevalence of upper case/toying with the font weights. Some other wordpress themes...
I'm Currently using wordpress.com....I've registered my .co.uk through siteground (through a recommendation) and its uses wordpress as your portal, siteground.com have offers on at the moment.
I know this is an older thread, but I might be able to help out with web hosting and/or web design. Definitely willing to offer basic help for free, especially with Wordpress, unless we're talking about advanced design and customization. Honestly what I'd recommend is building a website on Wordpress on a basic hosting plan, with your own domain name, finding a good theme (probably paid), then customizing it to your needs. Customization is pretty simple if you know basic Wordpress and CSS.