In yesterday’s website review, Kathleen mentioned how important it is to convey your genre with your website. It can be hard, depending on the genre. Even some published authors’ sites don’t do it well.
Quick: Can you tell me what genre these published authors write in? (I took the name off a couple and removed outright genre identifiers because that would be too easy, and that’s not what this is about—it’s about looking at the graphics on their site to see if they convey their genres. If you’ve read any of them or recognize their sites, try to judge only by what you see here.
Links and answers to be posted in the comments!
1.)
2.)
3.)
4.)
5.)
6.)
7.)
8.)
Post your guesses in the comments! The person with the most answers right (without cheating) will win . . . something!
are looking for volunteers to have your aspiring author website reviewed by two professionals!
I’ll ask you the same thing I asked a few other blog owners . . . what is the purpose of your site? What is your goal? If yours is community (which you seem to be doing excellent at fostering), then I think your community would attract new participants more easily if your site clearly states what your community revolves around. 
There may be a good reason for this. If you’re purposefully blogging under a pseudonym, and you want it keep it that way, you may want to keep potential publication info away from your site so you don’t get your real name associated with your site. (Then again, maybe you should be writing under a pseudonym, too.)
Also, your sidebar is quite long. I really like that you’ve been highly selective about what badges and honors to display. However, there are still a lot of links there. When visitors come across a long list of links, their eyes are likely to gloss over—they can’t focus on any single link, so they don’t bother looking at any of them. (A lot of links on a single page may also dilute the value you’re passing along to the sites you link to, in search engines’ eyes.)
Because your main page is so heavily based on graphics, it might be a little hard for search engines to understand. One 
One thing going for you is you have a sitemap. Generally, that’s a good way (albeit a last resort) to help users and especially search engines find the content on your site. However, when I clicked on the sitemap link, it was broken.
It’s not enough to make sure that the site makes sense from the home page, because very, very few people enter a site by the front door. We can’t even count on people who find us through a business card or bookmark entering through the front door because an unbelievably large percentage of Internet users think that URLs are supposed to be entered into the search engine bar of their browser. They don’t even know that URL bar exists up there! [Aggravating, but true: Google searches for “amazon.com” and “google.com” are amazingly high, and 
A writing blog. An in-world children’s picture book website. A website for your steamy romance ebooks. A site for your nonfiction aspirations. A personal blog. How many websites can one person have?
And then there’s the question of personal stuff: does it have a place on your professional site(s)? That also depends on your genre, the tone of your personal stuff, and your audience. If you have a “lifestyle” blog before you get published, then it’s fine to keep that and maintain the personal tone and the insights into your personal life. 
Think about why your readers will be coming to your website. Will it be because they’re interested in your book and want to learn a little more before they buy? Will it be to learn more about the author? (You could probably help them out a little more there 😉 ). Will it be to learn more about your next book? Will it be because they’re reviewing your book for their blog or newspaper? What are they looking for? Help them to find it—and make their paths to their goals clear. 
For [Hugh Howey], your site ranks #1 and #2 on Google, and #1 and #3 on Yahoo. Awesome! Bing, as always, is evil. They have your Facebook profile first, followed by LinkedIn, Facebook again, Twitter, your publisher, two articles about another Hugh Howey, and your profile on Asimovs. So apparently they don’t just hate Blogger blogs.
Finally, what else can you do to bring your visitors into your world? Make your website a window into the world of your books. Draw them in, so they just can’t help wanting to know about the characters in your world. This might mean re-designing a new home page that focuses on your characters and your world, instead of your blog…that way, when you post reviews on other products and books, your visitor’s first impression is still on YOUR book, instead of someone else’s. Feature your book covers on your home page…maybe overlap that nebula image with a small photo of each of your books tilted on edge, so there’s an instant sales pitch in one glance. If not there, get those covers somewhere on the home page! 
In some ways, however, a lifestyle blog can be even better than a writing blog. You don’t have to make the switch from writing about writing for writers—you already have a niche. You obviously already have a community around your blog, and your future readers can join in this community.
Sometimes you can get these things together. Blogger, for example, will give you everything—your domain is whatever.blogspot.com, Blogger stores your pages and files, and Blogger software generates your HTML code and provides the software that lets you maintain your site. 
You can use WordPress.com (and you can get a WordPress.com blog to show up at YourDomain.com, too, but it’s not free like it is on Blogger)—or you can use WordPress.org. It’s the same software, but with WordPress.org you can customize your blog however you want.