Here's a great author website example from Devansh Kamdar, a freelance writer & author!

Today, I had the pleasure to review and analyze Devansh Kamdar's author website. Devansh is a great freelance writer and author of a new book, Shantanu: Rakhta Charitra Book One. In this post, I will lay out all the reasons why Devansh did a great job with his author website, as well as a list of improvements he could make.

What makes this author website great?

The design is very simple, elegant, and easy to navigate. Devansh also clearly has a theme that he likes, the bubbly round buttons, light background with dark text, sprinkled with some bright colors. Having a design theme is another concept that is often overlooked. From the perspective of the user, a good design system makes it easier for users to navigate your site. Their eyes gain familiarity with how you lay things out. By keeping a consistent design, it makes it easier for users to intuitively know where things are. This makes for a more comfortable experience when browsing your site.

Simple website = good performance

Even though we don't have greens across the board, 3 out of 4 is really good! I will talk about why his performance took a hit, but check out that SEO 100?! Although it shows 100, unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean that Google will rank the page higher. It just means that Google's website indexer can perfectly crawl and understand what the heck this site is about. TLDR - Having good content is still king for SEO, but having a red score on SEO analysis here will hurt your site. Getting great scores on website analysis tools is a pretty good indicator, and it's really easy to do! If you can manage to keep your site SIMPLE, you have already won half the battle. Then it's just about having a consistent design system that makes it easier for users to navigate your site, using animations intelligently, and optimizing image load time. The laundry list of things you can do is quite long, but we are just keeping it simple today! If you do these 3 things, you're already doing very good!

Some areas of improvements

I must say, there aren't that many red flags about this website. Everything that I will highlight below are minor bugs, and low hanging fruits that can greatly improve Devansh's website. Let's take a look at them one by one.

Don't waste the landing page!

Your landing page is the most important page of your entire author website. Your job is to introduce who you are, and then convery as much value to the reader as possible on the landing page. Though Devansh has a very simple and elegant landing page, it has too little info. I suggest adding a featured book section, for example Susanne Leist's author website. This way readers can immediately be engaged with your MOST IMPORTANT work the moment they land on your page. Devansh can even consider moving the top section of his /Portfolio page on to the landing page to convery even more value!

Show off the book reviews!

If you have book reviews, pull them in! Those are a treasure trove of value that you can convery to your visitors. You don't need all of them, just a few of your favorite ones! This can be added right below the featured book section on your landing page.

UI issues on mobile

70-80% of your users will discover your website first on mobile. Over 90% of the web traffic today is on mobile, so it is very important that your author website looks just as clean on mobile as it is on a desktop. In fact, Google will first evaluate your website by crawling on mobile first before, to determine search ranking. You want to avoid 0 padding issues, where your texts are on the edge of the mobile screen. You should avoid hidden text issues, where your contents overflow, and becomes completely hidden. These are very simple to fix for professional web developers, but if you are using Wordpress or Wix, that might be tricky. After you publish your author website, you can double check on a mobile device to make sure it looks pleasant.

Another issue I found is that on mobile, the logo has the word "Writer", which looks like a navigation tab. This is not a big issue, but should be fixed. I kept clicking it thinking it was a link hahaha.

Regarding performance, the reason why Devansh's site only got a score of 73 was because of slow image loading. For users with 3G internet, the largest content loaded on the website took about 8 seconds. For those of us with fast internet speed, the same image may load in under 4 seconds. However, a huge percentage of the world does not have 4G or 5G speed internet. This is why indexer tools will screen for performance issues caused by large content loads. A simple way to fix this issue is to use a technique called "lazy loading", and back filling the space the image would eventually occupy with a blur image. However, if you're using platforms like Wordpress or Wix, this can be tricky if not impossible to do.