The benefits of author boxes

What is an author box? It is a box at the bottom of your blog posts that contains some information about you, the creator of the post, and/or website. These words have more of a biographical meaning and describe you briefly to the person reading your article.

Having an “Author Box” on your website is one method to gain greater visibility for yourself, your business, and most importantly your brand. 

An author box automates the process of increasing interaction on your WordPress site. It allows your readers to interact with you, the authors, and your site in general.

The benefits of author boxes

Although they act as a very small part of your site, proper use of author boxes can bring you multiple benefits. Below, we have listed some of them.

Introduce the readers to the author 

With author boxes you can introduce the readers to yourself. The information that you post helps the readers in determining the quality and source of the material they are consuming on your site. Allowing your visitors to learn about the individuals behind each piece of content you post makes your blog and its contributors appear more genuine.

Better connection between author and reader

In the internet world, where there is a large amount of content, it is very important to establish a connection between the one who supplies the information and the one who consumes that information. The best successes are based on building such relationships.

Improve SEO

SEO is of crucial importance to every site owner. Whether it is for a business, a blog site, a travel blog, etc, good SEO is essential for everyone. The author box can increase traffic to our website and it is the greatest and easiest approach to catch more people. Your author box should feature all of the most crucial information for your visitors to view, including social links so that people can quickly interact with you.

Keep the website more organized

An author box that includes links to the author’s most recent articles allows your viewers to easily browse additional pieces published by the same author rather than having to hunt around your website to discover them.

Authors are easily reachable 

If you add your social network links in the author boxes, your visitors will be able to quickly contact you, making your blog appear more realistic and the material on it more authentic. By revealing the author’s details on your site, you are adding your blog to the author’s portfolio, boosting the author’s “worth” in their specific niche.

How to create an author box?

Author boxes can be created in a couple of ways. If your website just has one author, you may simply hard-code the author box in your single.php file because you will not need to save or dynamically output any information from the database. 

Even if you’re highly experienced with WordPress, editing your theme files may be quite risky because any error can quickly ruin your theme. If an error occurs while your website is not in maintenance mode, your site will look like a mess and all the visitors will be able to see it. 

That’s why the best option for making an author box on your blog is using the Simple Author Box plugin. 

Introducing Simple Author Box

Simple Author Box is one of the best plugins if you want to add an author box to your blog. It will look fantastic on any screen, from a smartphone to a desktop PC. It provides all of the tools you’ll need to build author boxes, which will ultimately provide all of the essential information about your authors. 

It is also excellent for guest posts and guest authors.

Simple Author Box is available in both free and PRO versions, with different features in each. Both are fantastic, with the free version doing an outstanding job and the PRO version effectively doing a much better job.

The main features include showing your gravatar, name, and description (your bio). It also includes the name of the website and different social icons. Everything is fully customizable, from the theme, style, color, size to the text. 

The plugin makes the box appear automatically at the end of the page. It looks great on desktops, laptops, and mobile devices. 

The PRO version has additional features such as the option to position the author box (on top or bottom of the page), link control, allow guest authors if you choose to do so, change the color palette of the box and many more.

How to use this plugin?

Create an account

The first thing you need to do is create your account. Go to the link: https://dashboard.wpauthorbox.com. Enter the username you were given in the email you got when purchasing. After that follow the password reset link to set up your password and log in.

Install

After creating an account, install and activate the plugin. You can find it in the left-hand side menu. Activate the plugin using the license key and follow all the instructions.

Appearance

Here you can change the style of your author box. You can customize where you want your margins and padding to be – top, bottom, or both. You can also add a border to your box and choose how bold it will look.

You can adjust the style of your avatar image. Choose from the options like square, circle, ellipse, fancy, shear, and speed. If you want you can rotate the author avatar on hover.

In this section, you can show the link of the author website, add a nofollow attribute on that link or any other link and adjust the position of the link in the box.

Under Social Icons Type, you can choose the style of your social icons, rotate them, use that long shadow effect and add a thin border on the icons.

Other options that also appear in the Appearance section are selecting the author box border style, color, and the background image. You can hide the job title in the brackets, as well as hide certain author boxes. If you want to you can modify your author boxes with greater detail you can even make your own, custom CSS.

Author Box tabs

Just like adding tabs to a website, you can add tabs in your author box.

To modify the tabs go to Appearance -> Author Box -> Author Box Tabs. 

Here you can add the title of the tab, show posts of one of the authors in a separate tab, add custom HTML, and add content to it.

In the colors section, you can select the background color of the tabs, border color, hover background color, hover text color and the tab hover border color.

Colors

To adjust the colors of your author box go to Appearance -> Simple Author Box -> Colors. 

Choose the author name color you’d like to use as well as the border color, background color of the social icons bar, background color of the author box, the color of the author box paragraphs, the color of the links in the author box and social icons.

Guest Author

This feature is great for when you want to have a guest author on your website. To add a guest author box go to Appearance -> Simple Author Box -> Guest Author. Then turn on the “Enable Guest Authors” feature.

Here you can select a guest author for each post on your blog and add the guest author as a co-author.

Misc

This option can benefit anyone who is using a CSS optimization plugin to speed up their site. If enabled, Simple Author Box’s inline styles may help you achieve a higher score on performance testing services.

Tools

To use this feature go to Appearance -> Simple Author Box -> Tools. These tools are handy if you need to reset your website and don’t want to go through the hassle of readjusting the settings. With it, you can export settings, import settings, and reset them.

License

The License section contains your licensing information. You may activate or deactivate a specific license as well as enable Whitelabel mode here. Enabling the white-label licensing option hides the License and Support tabs, as well as all apparent references to WebFactory Ltd.

Dashboard: Rebranding

This feature allows you to modify the name, logo, and appearance of the plugin. As a result, you may show Simple Author Box as a brand-new plugin with your logo emblazoned all over it.

Dashboard: Manage Licenses

Before rebranding a plugin, you should attach a license. You can create a new license or if you have an existing one edit that one. After that find the “Custom Branding” feature on the right side of your screen. Select your brand and save the changes.

Conclusion

Author boxes are a great way to introduce yourself and other guest authors to your audience. By knowing a little bit about you the readers will have a better connection with you and have a better understanding of your articles. With Simple Author Box, you can make your author box as creative as you want and bring yourself closer to others.