I reviewed George RR Martin's website to help authors understand how to create a great author website

As an author, your website is one of your most powerful tools for connecting with readers and selling books. But if it's not designed well, it could be doing more harm than good. I've reviewed countless author websites, and here I will review George RR Martin's website. It goes to show that even the most popular authors can suffer from a poorly designed website.

The good:

• Lots of contents, all very relevant and easily assessable to the fans.
• Well structured navigations tab.
• Design is a bit dated, but has a nice retro look.

The bad:

• Website scores very low in accessibility, which makes it hard for physically impaired users to navigate site
• Poor website practices. More of a Wordpress issue.
• Not mobile responsive. The mobile view is basically a shrunken version of desktop view. Extremely small.

This is a simple lighthouse site performance analysis tool I used. Its important for everything to be green for a site to have good SEP. If you're George RR Martin.... you may not have to worry about that. For 99% of authors trying to succeed in this competitive market, you must pay attention to these metrics. George's website likely suffers from legacy codes, unoptimized image loading, and lacking in accessibility.

There's also a bug on the newsletter page. It's completely blank... users have no way of subscribing. This page serves very little purpose.

When it comes to best practices and accessibility, if you're using Wordpress or Squarespace, you just have to hope that these platforms care about it as much as you do. If you are shelling out $1000s of dollars to hire a web developer, it's important to understand what makes a good site. Double check mobile responsiveness, performance (If loading takes longer than 3 seconds, that's bad), and green SEO scores. Alternatively, you can give us a shot! It's completely free, and we genuinely care about helping authors succeed by creating the best website for you.