Help Topics

Activating Your Account

To launch your website, you will need to activate your Pub Site account. You must activate your Pub Site account before you can change the domain name. To do that, log in to your Pub Site website.

Add a Blog Category in Your Menu

How to Add a Blog Category in Your Menu:

How to add a Home Page Banner. For reference take a look at these websites :

https://wendywilliamsauthor.com

https://aimeeliu.net

The banner is located underneath the menu, unlike the header which is located above or beside the menu. Another key difference is that the header appears on every page, providing consistent navigation, while the banner is displayed only on the home page, serving as a focal point for featured content or messaging.

Adding a Book

To add a book to your Pub Site website, you can follow these steps:

Adding a Book with Multiple Formats

If you have a book with multiple formats, take these steps to display formats on a single book page.

Adding a New Page to your Pub Site Website

Follow these instructions to learn how to add a new page to your Pub Site website. In Admin, go to Pages & Navigation. You’ll see two sections for pages options. In “Main Navigation Menu” on the left, you can see the pages that are on your website. In “Not Included in Navigation Menu” on the right, you’ll see a list of pre-designed page options for you to choose from. You can either choose from this list or create a new page to add to your website. In this article, we will teach you how to do both.

Adding an Author

If you would like to add an author to your website, go to the author's tab. At the top right click, + Add Author.

Adding an Embed Code

You can embed just about any feature and script. You have access to thetag area of the pages, and you can access the HTML just about everywhere on the site.

Here are a few ways to achieve this:

Adding an Embedded Video

To add a video to your website, you should upload your video to Youtube or Vimeo first. Here's why:

They automatically do any resizing or conversion you need
It makes it easier to add it to your website
There is greater discoverability — more people may find you

Follow these instructions to add a Youtube video to your Pub Site website.

Adding Author Appearances

With Pub Site, it is easy to add author appearances to your website. Once you enter yourself as an author,

Click on the Authors tab in the menu bar
Click on the small pencil to the right of the author name

Adding Author Social Links

You will find the Author Social media links within the Authors tab, then by selecting the pencil icon next to the author.

Once you've selected the pencil icon you will find the social links tab.

Adding Bookseller Buttons

You can add the bookseller buttons for a book by going Titles/Products, selecting the Book, and going to the Purchase Links tab. Here, you can copy and paste links of the book page from the book seller's site.

Adding MailChimp to your Pub Site Website

Go to https://mailchimp.com/, Log in to your account or sign up for a free account.

There are basically two types of signup forms you will use — a pop-up form that will appear, or "pop up," on the page when someone arrives at your website, and an embedded form that you can place almost anywhere on your website, including the sidebar column on the interior pages of your site.

Adding MailerLite to your Pub Site Website

Go to https://www.mailerlite.com, Log in to your account or sign up for a free account.

There are two types of signup forms you can use — a pop-up form that will appear, or "pop up," on the page when someone arrives at your website, and an embedded form that you can place almost anywhere on your website, including the sidebar column on the interior pages of your site.

Adding SEO to Your Pub Site Website

As you know, adding SEO to your author website is very important. If you don't know what SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is or why it's important, read about it in Search Engine Optimization: Basic SEO Tips Every Author Website Needs. Read more to learn about every place you can add SEO to your Pub Site author website to increase visibility and traffic.

Adding Your Blog to Your Amazon Author Profile via RSS

Go to author central and populate your Amazon Author page with a photo, bio, and blog. You can claim editing privileges on this page by registering with Amazon’s Author Central program: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ This page is tied to your personal Amazon login.

Once you are on your profile page, click add blog

Arranging the Order of Books

Books are in descending publication date automatically. There is a way to reorder the books on listing pages. Use this option if you don't want to order your books by publication date.

Canceling Your Account

To cancel your Pub Site account, log into your site, click on the Account button to the far right.

Change the Email Address on the Contact Form

Please follow these instructions to change the email address on the contact form:

Messages submitted to the contact form will be delivered to the email address you signed up with.

Change Your Payment Method

Please change your payment method by following these directions:

Changing the Menu for a One Book Site

If you are only displaying one book on your site, you can change the "Books" tab on your site menu to better suit your needs. By default, the "Books" tab leads to a page displaying all books. If there is only one book on the site, you can change the tab to read "The Book" to take visitors directly to the book page.

Changing the Page Name and Menu Title

Here are the instructions to change your page name and/or menu title.

Create Blog Categories

How to create a category for your blog:

Create Product Categories

Click on the Product Categories submenu button under Titles/Products.

Create your categories by selecting the "Add Category" button on the top right, then go back to each book and add them to the category, or categories, you want, and then click on Update Product.

Creating Blog URLs

When you publish a blog post, you will need to have an associated permalink. To create a permalink, go to the admin section of your blog post. Then click "Search Engine Optimization" in the submenu.

Credit Card Transactions and Refunds

How can I turn off processing credit card transactions on my site?

How do I provide refunds to my customers?

Design and Customization

Pub Site is an easy-to-use website builder designed specifically for books and authors. You can customize the design of your website by clicking on the "Design" tab on your website dashboard. This allows you to change the layout of your homepage, select a theme, and adjust colors and fonts to create a professional-looking website. You can also create a custom header using images and customize fonts and headers as per your preferences.

Disable Captcha

You can edit or remove the CAPTCHA but not the response question. We have to have at least one of them or your form (and email), and our server, would get overrun by spam.

Here’s where you can remove CAPTCHA:

Domain forwarding

Do you have more than one domain name purchased? The option to forward that domain to your current website URL is a possibility with most domain registrars.

You will want to find your DNS records and scroll to the bottom. However, every platform may be different.

Look at these photos from Go Daddy below to see what this may look like

Domain Name Basics

Before you start the development of your author website, you need to decide on a domain name. It is helpful to decide before you start development because it could impact the design of your website. When deciding on a domain name there some things to consider: what to choose, availability, and buying.

Ecommerce Shipping Options

There are two options for setting shipping costs for a book:

— set it per book in the book’s profile

— or set it globally for all books on the site

Ecommerce Test Mode

While your store is in Test Mode any purchases that are processed will not be sent to the payment gateway. This lets you test your customer’s experience and see what it will be like to receive orders without waiting for your first customer.

File types you should use: (jpg/jpeg, gif, and png)

The key thing to keep in mind about image file types is that whenever possible use JPG instead of PNG. Even if you create an image in PNG, save it as a JPG before using it on a website when it’s a larger graphic. You can always go back to the original png to make changes. PNGs can be multiple times the file size of the same image as a jpg. This is particularly important when doing large banner graphics.

Google Analytics / Sitemap Error Messages

Most messages you might receive from Google are normal and not necessarily an indication of a problem.

Google Search Console and Sitemaps

Learn about the benefits of Google Search Console here and decide if it's something you would like to do. Check out this user guide to read about their best practices. If you want to register your website with Google and submit a sitemap, follow these instructions.

Google Search Console Redirect

Identifying and fixing the page that is not indexed due to a redirect in Google Search Console can be done with a few steps. Here’s how you can do it:

Header Dimensions

We suggest using header dimensions that are between 2000-2500 pixels wide by 150-500 pixels for height.

Home Page Layouts

To access the available home page layouts and customize your website's appearance, follow these steps:

How to Add Audio Files (mp3s)

There are two easy ways of doing it. Both require delving into the page HTML. On any page, click edit, then click on the "Source" button at the top left. Find where you want it on the page and paste it in. An easy way to find where you want it is to put in a bunch of Xs while in regular edit view, then click on Source and you can easily find the XXXXX you entered. Replace the Xs with the embed code.

How to Change your Admin Password

If you would like to change your password you can go to the Website tab, then the Users (Administrators) tab.

Click on the email address of the user you want to change.

How to Create a Placeholder Menu Button

Go to Pages & Navigation tab in the admin menu. Click on the blue "Add New Page" button in the submenu.

Name it whatever you want the menu button to say. Select "Link to File or External Website." Put "#" in the Link box. Click on Add Page; then Save Changes.

How to Feature a Book on the Homepage and Sidebar

If you want to showcase a book on the homepage and make it the featured book on your Pub Site website, follow these steps. The book that will automatically appear in the sidebar is the one placed at the number one position in the Featured Products section.

How to Find and Add Your GoodReads Feed and Review Widget to Pub Site

According to Goodreads help you can find these widgets by "logging in to Goodreads, click on your profile picture, click Account Settings and then select the Widgets tab. Scroll down the page to view the widgets available and follow the instructions to copy the widget code into your blog."

Once you have received the code you want to use there are a few locations you can paste your Goodreads code.

How to import your Wordpress blog posts into your website

If you have a WordPress site/blog you can export the blog posts from WordPress and import them into your Pub Site website. Here are the steps to do this: For instructions on how to export your WordPress blogs read here. In your Pub Site Admin, select the Authors tab, then to the right of the author select Edit Blog. On the top right you will see an import your Wordpress blogs button. Select that and upload the file.

How to Keep a Blog Always on Top of the Page

To keep a blog post sticky on your Pub Site website, you can follow these steps:

How to Link to a File or Another Website

Using this method you can link to a web page on your site or another, or offer a file, such as a PDF (.pdf) to view or make downloadable.

Enter the text you want to use, like XYZ Podcast, highlight the text, then click on the link icon in the edit bar:

How To Make a Canva Banner

There is a site named Canva where you can create all sorts of graphics, including website headers. Even if you have a square, you can create a single graphic combining your name and logo. Here are instructions and samples to give you an idea. 2200 pixels x 400 pixels is a good size for a banner header.

How to Remove Your Sidebar

You can remove your sidebar by following these instructions.

How to Sell your Book as a Digital E-book

Here are the instructions to set up your book to sell your book as a digital file.

Inserting/Adding an image or photos to a page

If you would like to add a photo throughout your descriptions or text follow these instructions or watch the video below.

Click on the text wherever you want the photo, this could be at the very bottom or randomly throughout your text.

Select the image icon which is located at the top of the text box.

Introduction to Using the Blog Feature

Blogs are under the Authors tab, which allows multiple authors to have their blog on one site. First, click on the Authors tab in the menu bar, then the green "Edit Blog" button to the far right of the author name. Click on the blue "Add Blog Article" button on the right side of the submenu.

Paste Without Formatting

Often word processing programs like MS Word, and other programs and editors, have formatting accompanying the text that is in the background that you cannot see. But when you copy and paste this text onto your Pub Site website, this formatting may cause the text to appear different and override your Pub Site default formatting, making some pages, or parts of pages, appear with different fonts sizes, spacing, etc. To paste text without formatting from a word processing program or another website, follow these tips.

Pasting Embed Codes (Google and Mail)

There are many kinds of embed codes to paste into your website. The most common are mailing list pop-up codes and Google Analytics codes. Please see the instructions below to find where to paste them:

Pasting your Google Analytics Code

Please follow Google Analytics instructions to set up your analytics account. At the bottom of these instructions, you will see how to find the Google Tag. Once you have the code, you can paste it into your Pub Site website.

Remove a page

Some pages cannot be deleted because they are associated with dynamic functionality that your website may rely on. If you do not want these pages to display anywhere on your site, simply drag those pages to the 'Not Included in Navigation' area of the Pages & Navigation interface.

Removing Blog Published Date

RSS URL for Amazon's Author Central

You can populate your author page on Amazon by adding a photo, bio, blog, etc. You can claim editing privileges to your author page by registering with Amazon’s Author Central program: https://authorcentral.amazon.com/ This page is tied to your personal Amazon login.

Search Engine Optimization: Basic SEO Tips Every Author Website Needs

Ok, so you were convinced that you must have an author website, you now have one, or will have one soon, and now people start mentioning SEO and how important it is. And maybe you start getting emails telling you how you are missing out on website traffic, that you must purchase their services. Then they mention the dreaded meta tags. The stress level rises. All you wanted to do was write a book.

Sending a Shipping Message with Pub Site

Once you have shipped the book/product, go into the order (In Admin, click on Ecommerce, then Orders) and check both boxes and then click on Update Order at the bottom. An email will be sent to the email address given by the purchaser.

Separate Categories

Please follow these steps to set up separate categories besides books. Most members use this for other items they would like to sell that they do not want on their book pages.

Setting up Ecommerce on your website

Pub Site offers the option to sell directly from your site with built in Ecommerce at no extra cost. You will need to have a payment processor like PayPal, and Pub Site makes it very easy to connect PayPal to your site to accept payments via PayPal or credit cards.

First, in the Ecommerce tab make sure to uncheck the box to allow payments. By default, that box is checked so ecommerce is turned off.

Sidebar Instructions

Here you should enter a short description of this product. The information entered here will display on the product catalog page and the top of the product detail page.

Social Media Share Icons

The social media share icons are for sharing your blog via those platforms. These will be completely different from the social media buttons underneath the author's profile which is linked to their accounts.

Suggested Image Sizing

Here are the recommended dimensions for your author website to ensure that the photos display correctly without any distortion or pixelation. Please note that these are not exact requirements, but rather suggestions that can help guide you if needed.

Tips for Posting Blogs

When creating a blog post, there are two boxes for text. The first box, Article Intro, should include a short descriptive paragraph or the beginning of the full blog. The second box, Full Article, should be the blog article. On your site's blog page, the Article Intros will display with a "Read More" button that leads to the Full Article.

Two Author Side-by-Side Home Page Layout

There is a home page layout available that is ideal for two authors where the both authors are featured side-by-side on the home page. To access the available home page layouts...

Under Construction Mode

You might not want your site accessible to the public just yet. If you enable Under Construction Mode, you and your other Website Admins will be the only people who can see what your store looks like.

Uploading Book Cover Images

To add a book cover image, go to the Titles/Products tab in the admin menu. Find and select the book you would like to add an image. Go to the Images tab in the product menu and click the folder icon (circled below). Make sure you do not select the green "Add Image" button"—that button is for adding additional images. Selecting the folder icon will open up the File Manager.

Using a Gmail Address in Your Contact Form

The two contact forms in your Pub Site work by sending you the message to an email address of your choice when the user submits the form.

If you are are using a Gmail address in your contact form and are not receiving your messages, Gmail filters may be why. Please start by checking your spam folders. Also, Gmail has other folders in which it will put incoming emails, including "Social" and "Promotions" as shown in the screen capture below. Look there. Or maybe click on "All Mail" to see if the messages display.

Using PayPal with Pub Site

You can easily add ecommerce to a Pub Site website. Go to the ecommerce tab and uncheck the first checkbox.

Using the Photo Gallery Feature

To create a gallery, go to Pages & Navigation in Admin. Click on "Add New Page" at the top right. Name the page and select Photo Gallery from the Type dropdown menu.

Using Your Domain Name with Pub Site

To use your own domain name, you will need to go to your domain name account at your registrar (for example, GoDaddy, Network Solutions, etc.) and make a change. You will need to change the “A” record in the DNS to our IP address, 100.28.80.129. Look for the DNS option for the domain name you want to use. There may be a string of four nembers in the 'A' record, or it might say “default” or “parked” (It might for newly registered domain names).

Website Holiday Banners

Happy Holidays Pub Site Members

To make our sites more festive, we have created some graphics you can add to your site. Take a look and use the one that speaks best to you. Here’s a quick video on how to drag the image to your desktop and then add it to your home page.

Pub Site Support Website

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