In this episode, we interview Mason Stokes about moving his professional website and domain, masonstokes.com from Wix to Skidmore Domains’ WordPress platform. The conversation explores both practical and professional motivations—from significant cost savings to creating a more contemporary aesthetic for his upcoming novel release. Stokes offers candid insights into the modern publishing landscape, where author websites and social media presence aren’t just optional but contractually required.

The discussion proves especially valuable for faculty members considering their own digital presence, with Stokes emphasizing the importance of starting simple and utilizing institutional support. He shares practical advice about web design, social media integration, and the evolving expectations for authors and academics in the digital age. The episode concludes with an entertaining teaching anecdote where a projected water bottle shadow was mistakenly analyzed as part of William Blake’s artwork!

Key Points:

• Cost-effective transition from paid hosting to institutional WordPress platform
• Practical insights into author platform requirements in modern publishing
• Straightforward advice for faculty beginning their digital journey
• Integration of website with social media strategy
• Real-world examples of learning through trial and error

 

Ben Harwood: Hello, world. Welcome to Skid Pod, Mason. You recently migrated your website from Wix over to WordPress and joined our Skidmore Domains, uh, Community Network. Can you tell us what motivated you to migrate your site over?

 

Mason Stokes: Sure, and thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I guess there are a couple of reasons why I wanted that migration. One was esthetic. I had a website before that was built on Wix, and it began to look like it was built back in the 90s.

 

It didn’t have the esthetic that I’m seeing now, which is a sort of cleaner, even more minimalist esthetic. I was interested in a total redesign, in conjunction with the novel I’ve got coming out.

And so there was that motivation.

 

Doing that here made that real easy because the other motivation was financial. I’ve been paying probably between 2 and $300 a year to host a site on Wix. That was just money thrown out the window, especially when I learned that Skidmore would offer me this opportunity at no cost.

 

And so I think when you combine that desire to build a new website from the ground up with a new novel coming up, plus the opportunity of saving a lot of money, it seemed a no brainer.

 

Ben Harwood: Definitely sounds like a win win, for sure. And we’re delighted to have any community member hosts their content over on Skidmore Domains or the Community WordPress.

 

Can you talk a little bit about how having a professional online presence is helpful to you as a professor and an author?

 

Mason Stokes: It’s certainly becoming almost essential, I think, for authors especially, as I move into writing more fiction than scholarly work. It’s simply expected that as a novelist, I would have my own website: MasonStokes.com. Publicists assume it. My contract assumes that I have that sort of presence. I mean, my contract even specifies my book contract, specifies the number of social media posts I need to make X number of weeks before publication after publication. It’s certainly a contractual responsibility.

 

You know, this is all about sort of like trying to find eyeballs and ears, and social media is where that happens now. I think we’re all in some sort of contest to find readers. And, it’s assumed that I’m going to be out there on Facebook, Twitter now X. I’m less visible on Instagram and TikTok because I just don’t think those are my games. I was told at some point: “do what you feel comfortable doing.”

 

And I am of the Facebook Twitter generation, but I really don’t think I can be launching a novel or maintaining an academic presence without both a website and various social media outlets at my disposal.

 

Ben Harwood: So, WordPress.org is open source software that empowers people all over the world. I think 39% or 40% of the web is built on WordPress.org.

 

You’re using your own domain with WordPress.org. You’re not paying any money for the software. As a community member here, you get the hosting at no cost to you. I’m interested, though, about your own professional website and the relationship with social media.

 

Now, are you using other social media out there such as X and Facebook to drive traffic to to your website?

 

Mason Stokes: Ideally, yes. I think it’s a two way street, but my guess is more people are going to find me via social media than will find me via my website. Although if you Google my name, it takes you to MasonStokes.com, but I’m trying to make that go both ways.

 

On my website I’ve got Facebook and X icons on every page.

 

But any time I post on X or Facebook, I’m trying to remind people that I have a website there as well, because there’s more information there.

 

There are preorder links to various online retailers, to the publisher itself, to reviews, and events.

 

I really want to use social media to drive them to a space where there’s more information about me. I think it’s primarily goes in that direction.

 

Ben Harwood: Okay. You’ve taken it a step further even. You have, I think, on your web page, a ‘Contact Me’ page. Can you tell us about the your rationale for having that direct conduit to you, to your personal email?

 

Mason Stokes: Sure. Yes, I want readers and event organizers to be able to reach me without having to send my email abroad. A ‘Contact Me’ page seems essential, especially as an author of young adult fiction. It’s important to give readers an easy way to connect with you and provide a clear path for making that connection. And so, the ‘Contact Me’ page works in that way.

 

But I also have links there for my editor, my agent, my publicist, anybody who’s looking to book events, anybody looking for rights questions, reprints, that sort of thing.

 

It’s a sort of one-stop shop for how to find people that might be related to the book that’s coming out.

 

Ben Harwood: Is there any advice you would give to faculty who are considering making a move to go online?

 

Mason Stokes: That’s a good question. One piece of advice is simply don’t worry about messing stuff up. Those of us who are not, I mean, I consider myself an early, early adopter, pretty tech savvy, but I’m nowhere near tech fluent. And so I’m going to, like, poke around and miss things and learn by trial and error a lot. And that’s fine. It’s really hard to ruin a project that you’re working on if you’re trying things. And so one idea is try to be let go of some of the fear. Okay, let go of some of the fear. Also, I think do more with less.

 

I find increasingly website design that sort of simple and intuitive is better than a very, very flashy multifocal piece of work.

 

And so I think sort of clarity and simplicity are really good.

 

But also I just think, you know, one piece of advice is to do it because there’s such good support here. You’ve been instrumental in helping me put my website together.

 

Ben Harwood: Thank you.

 

Mason Stokes: You’ve asked lots, I mean, you’ve answered lots of questions in person over email. I worry about your workload at some point as we all begin to do more of this. But I know there’s really good and ample support here at Skidmore for this.

 

So if you don’t have a personal website or if you’re hosting one elsewhere, I just think there’s no reason not to bring it to Skidmore because you’re saving money. You’re getting local institutional support. The packages that are available through WordPress and Divi Builder, which is a set of templates and a sort of an app builder, I just found elegant.

 

And so I didn’t really so much design a website as I found a packet for authors that looked really good to me, and I tailored it to my own needs.

 

And that tailoring meant carving away a lot of the stuff in that package that I didn’t need, and leaving just the essentials. But the design itself, the animation, the motion, the colors was all there for me. And there are a lot of packets like that for all sorts of different needs and functions.

 

I think we’re all trying to be more sort of multimodal in our communication. As a writing instructor, I’ve spent so much of my life thinking about words on a page; and that being my primary mode of communication, I just don’t think that’s sufficient anymore. I still value that above everything.

 

But I think in this moment, we need to be able to communicate visually, orally and through various forms of tech.

 

And I think, you’re helping professors who might be a little slow to that process realize that there are a lot of different ways to communicate. And for those of us with work out, um, words on a page is not always going to do it.

 

Forms like this, podcasts, other sorts of visual demonstration. I just think it’s increasingly important this moment to sort of be as diverse as we can in the method of communicating.

 

Ben Harwood: Okay. And certainly having a public facing presence can help to underscore the way to do that.

 

All right. So we’re going to try something a little different on this episode of the SkidPod.

 

Is there a funny story or anecdote that comes to mind from when you were teaching or writing?

 

Mason Stokes: Yes, that’s a good and embarrassing question, because part of being a teacher is being embarrassed publicly all the time. Because we’re standing up in front of people and we’re winging it a lot of the time.

 

Not to say we don’t know what we’re talking about, but we’re improvising in the moment.

 

So, I remember a moment early in my career here, and this is a story related to technology. I think it’s apt. This is back in the day before PowerPoint, before anything really, other than projectors.

 

I was using a slide projector.

 

And if those of you listening or seeing don’t know, this is old school little pieces of cellophane in a little piece of plastic.

 

You throw light through it and it projects the picture on the wall. Right? This is how we used to show images.

 

And I was teaching poetry of William Blake, who was a romantic poet, but who incorporated graphic work into his poetry, or rather, poetry into his graphic work.

 

His poems are interlaced within beautiful drawings, paintings, illustrations.

 

So to teach Blake’s poetry, you have to teach Blake’s art.

 

And one way to do that is to throw it up on the screen and do what we call close-read, just as we do with a paragraph of text.

 

You close read the image. What’s going on with color, what’s going on, the tone, what’s going on with detail.

 

And so I’m doing that. I think it’s going really well. I’m putting up this image and this shape and this tonal complexity.

 

And then I see this image down in the bottom left hand corner. I didn’t really notice before, but it’s there.

 

And so I start talking about its relationship to the greater work and how it participates in a kind of symmetry and coherence and how to emphasize the thematic aspects of this.

 

And as I’m saying, all of this, which sounds really smart, I realize that that image is actually the shadow of my water bottle, which is between the projector and the screen, and I’m reading it as if it’s a part of what Blake put there.

 

And I’m wondering now how, how long are my students going to let me do this?

 

Because they have to know and then let me do it for a while, right?

 

Because it was fun, right? For them to see me take seriously something that wasn’t really there.

 

I finally found a way to segway out of this.

 

This could be a thematic coherence, or it could simply be my water bottle projected onto the screen, and that got me out of it.

 

But it’s a reminder that even in the early days, technology doesn’t always work for us, and it’s going to lead to some glitches and mistakes.

 

Hopefully they become organic parts of the process. But that was stayed with me because that was just so ridiculous.

 

Ben Harwood: And can you imagine if Blake himself had been in the room? I wonder what commentary he would have given on that?

 

Mason Stokes: I think he would love the fact that I was making a great deal out of something that wasn’t there, which is what English professors are sometimes accused of.

 

But I will claim it proudly that I made that water bottle a part of that picture, and I think it worked very good.

 

Ben Harwood: Mason Stokes, thank you so much for coming on the pod today. It’s been my pleasure.

 

Mason Stokes: Thanks for having me.