Um, so I wasn’t thinking so hard when I only posted two critiques last week—so this week we’ll have four reviews, and then take a look at our favorite author websites.
First up this week, Becke Martin‘s beautiful site!
Kathleen’s comments
Dear Becke,
This is a fantastic, beautiful website! Your colors are pleasing and cheerful—but I’m not sure you’ve effectively portrayed and advertised what you write at first glance.
Both your catch phrase and your site’s graphics led me to believe that you wrote either humorous, passionate, romance, or light-hearted chic lit romance. Therefore, it caught me by surprise to read that your books have magic and mystery, and that you write romantic suspense. This means that your best potential readers, those looking for romantic suspense, might click away as soon as they see that big cheerful sunflower and get the impression that you DON’T write romantic suspense. Do you see the problem?
I think you’ll have an easier time reaching readers if you redesign the colors and graphics on the site to look less like a country kitchen and more like the world of your books.
I also think that you should adjust your catch phrase. Even adding the word “magical” twist would help, though it still makes it sound more like Sabrina the Teenage Witch than romantic suspense.
Finally, the image that (I think) replaces your “Welcome” word on the home page isn’t showing in Firefox. [Note: it’s showing on my Firefox . . . not sure why that would be different—Jordan]
Your content layout and blog integration are fantastic. So I think that once you match the look of the site to your genre, you’ll have a top notch website. God bless!
—Kathleen MacIver, KatieDid Design
Jordan’s comments
What a beautiful website! While I do agree with Kathleen, I also want to point out that you’re doing so much right here. You’ve made your website fun—including with an ongoing contest.
You’re using your books and news page to highlight not only your works but the awards you’ve won (and you even link here—I’m flattered). That’s a great way to show off your works and your awards to prospective agents, publishers and buyers. (As always, of course, I think 5-7 polished pages of a story can highlight your work really well, too.) As Kathleen mentioned, your blog is integrated perfectly with your site.
Your search engine presence is good—your site is #1 for your name on all three search engines. Your MySpace, Twitter, guest blog posts and other blog mentions also rank in the top ten. One thing you could do here is add a meta description to your site—often search engines use that description as the text underneath the link in their results.
A couple technical comments: when I view a blog post, the page looks really strange (the text is all off to the side very far). Also, on the homepage sidebar, where it says “Check out my blogs,” I expected it to be a link. On a few pages, I’d like to see the text (or lists of links) categorized or accompanied by explanatory graphics—long lists of links or blocks of text can make web readers’ eyes glaze over.
I see that your website was done professionally, and I assume you had input in the process—so you tell me, Becke. What were you going for with your site design?
Hope this helps!
Jordan
What do you think?
be available), etc. You want to get all of this on your front page in an easily read and understood way. If the book will be available through Amazon, then as soon as a page is up for it, make sure you link to it!
competition for your name, and Bing can’t find you at all (not terribly surprising). Google ranks your site as #5 and your blog as 8 (your Twitter profile is between those). Yahoo ranks your blog as #1 and your site at the 8th and 9th positions.
about the stories you’re writing. I agree that book covers will liven the page up (although I think designing one’s own covers for an unpublished site is hokey, 
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 
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! 