Learn how to create a great author website by analyzing Dan Brown's website

Understanding what it takes to create a great author website, I reviewed Dan Brown's website to highlight the good lessons one should take away and the mistakes to avoid when creating one's own author website.

Dan Brown, the famous author of "The Da Vinci Code", has a truly unique website. It perfectly embodies the style and genre of his writings. I will review his website not just from the look and feel of it, but also the performance, SEO, best practices...etc

The good:

• Great use of images. Good use of dark background, and unique background photos to create a mysterious feel for the website.
• Landing page has abundant information, books, about-me, films...etc
• No broken links.
• Navigations are well structured
• Layout of information on the site is well structured

The bad:

• The blue background at the top is actually a link to a video, but that's not very obvious
• Lots of errors from google plugin, likely for the youtube video link that is broken
• Very poor performance
• Lots of unexpected UI shift and behavior

Performance of the site is quite poor.... all red across the board. For Dan Brown, he can get away with this. For 98% of authors, this would mean that search engines like Google will literally take your site, and put it in the trash, yikes!

Lots of errors on the site. Though these are hidden from the user, they do impact site performance. This is the site attempting to make 100+ calls and failing, due to the broken google/youtube link.

The books have inconsistent link behaviors, which can be frustrating for some users. Some books link to a page, and some link to a completely different website.

The largest item on the page takes over 20 seconds to LOAD!!!! Search engines expect a load time of < 4 seconds.

The photo gallery plays hide and seek. Layout shifts are frustrating for users, and this one is definitely not accessible. In the year 2024, this site will get a score of 3.5/5. If this was 2009, maybe we can be lenient and score a 4.1/5. Technology has come a long way, and some of these issues are quite easy to overcome.

If you're looking to create a powerful author website, give us a try! Myauthor is a free tool that help authors create beautiful websites. I am the sole creator of this app, and I work on it in my spare time, so please be patient. If you encounter any issues, or have feedbacks, kindly share them with me! It will help me improve the site for other authors!