Build Freelance Writing Business Website

I discussed recently how cancer has all but destroyed my freelance writing business. No matter how good you are, after six months of being completely unavailable and then another few months of, “As of right now, I can definitely do this, but I have some appointments coming up and… “, clients move on. It isn’t really a comment on me, so much as it is that business continues.

The opportunity here, for me and you, is that as an experienced, professional freelance writer, I know how to build a freelance writing business from scratch. That’s just what I’m doing, and I’m documenting it so that you can build a freelance writing business from scratch too.

The Freelance Writer Website

A website is absolutely essential for a freelance writer. Even if you meet someone in person, network, and hand them your business card, the first thing they are going to do is check your website to find out more about you.

You want your website to make a good professional impression. It should also give someone an idea of what types of things you usually write, or specialize in, while also leaving open the door to writing other things. Ideally, it should also offer some writing samples that prospective clients can view.

I have a blog attached to my main business website that I use both to generate content and to provide a commentary on what it like to be a freelance writer. I hope that in addition to offering up search-bait for indexing it is also a useful resource both for writers and clients. It looks pretty decent and modern thanks to a recent WordPress theme. Honestly, I think I could do better, but it is fine for now.

My main business website, however, is probably costing me potential clients. I put it up years ago, and frankly forgot all about it. It worked well enough, and eventually I had enough work that I didn’t really need more coming in through the website, but now…

As it stands, my website is a bit dated. It is a fixed width which means it shows up poorly on mobile devices, although it displays well enough on most desktop monitors. Part of me just wants to give it some flexibility on fitting to the screen, but the writing doesn’t sound or feel like me anymore and I feel there could be improvements.

Unfortunately, as a static website I can’t just change a theme. I will have to code a new design. Fortunately, I found a reasonably priced repository of website themes that I can use to update the site.

If you are a writer, I highly recommend building your website with something like WordPress. It is much easier to change your theme and add or remove content. You can use Pages for your static content, and you can choose a static page as your home page.

I considered using WordPress for my homepage. However, when I set my set up over 10 years ago, I put several static pages under arcticllama.com and the blog under arcticllama.com/blog/

This leaves me with a few options.

Move Static Pages Into Existing Blog

One option would be to move my static webpages into my blog and do what I just recommended to you above. The catch to that is doing so would require changing the address of each page. So, my main page becomes arcticllama.com/blog/, my freelance money writer page becomes https://www.arcticllama.com/blog/freelance-financial-writer and so on.

This isn’t inherently bad, but there are a lot of links pointing to the old address and I don’t like the look of everything being under the blog.

Make Blog For Static Pages

I could add another WordPress blog in the root directory. This would give me two separate blogs and I could use a different theme and setup for my main pages. Since it would not be setup in a subdirectory, the addresses would not have the /blog/ thing in the middle.

There are ton of advantages to this idea, and I might be leaning here.

Manually Make a New Static Website

My last option is to manually make a new static website. This is probably the ideal solution, but it also takes the most time, and if I’m trying to rebuild a freelance writing business from scratch, I can’t be spending a ton of time building a new website.

This is what I started doing, but I might change to making it a WordPress site. The good news is that decision isn’t permanent. I can always bring the static site back out if I choose to do so.