A few months ago we posted the following blog:

Website vs. Blog

We’ve been having a debate on the 26th floor about what sort of web presence we “need” to make our publishing business successful.

Given that we’re planning extensive digital marketing campaigns for each of our books, we need a great website, right?

While we figure out the next step, we started this blog, www.26thstory.com …..for about $15 a month; It’s scrappy. It’s no frills…….but it does show videos and photos, and it takes questions and comments, and has living, breathing author pages such as these for Emeril and Joann Davis, and will have one for each author as we sign them up.

Which then leads me to ask: Why do we “need” a website? We’ve been looking at proposals for hundreds of thousands of dollars, and I am still not clear what we would accomplish with a website that justifies that amount of money. I certainly understand the difference between their functions, just not the ROI.

Nearly everyone who’s opinion on the matter I highly regard says we need one. Certainly the companies we’ve looked into hiring say yes. And yet no one seems to be able to explain to me “WHY” in a way that makes sense to me.
So I’m asking YOU……what could we gain with a website that’s worth spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on?

Your comments to the question were AMAZING. I read and used every one. The result is that we decided to forgo the expensive website and instead build a WordPress site. We had a developer named Steffen Rasile, from SRA Design Studio in Helena, Montana, work with us on the technical stuff. Love Steffen. He’s great to work with.

The whole thing came in under $10,000. It’s easily maintainable by all of us and our authors. We hope it’s a fun place to hang out. It’s a work in progress.

Here it is, day 1. Would love to hear what you think.

Thank you for always being so helpful!

–Debbie