Quick Question: Author Websites
As you may have gathered, I'm running my own business (and loving pretty much every minute of it) these days: I'm a freelance website content manager (or 'webguy' for short...) and a significant proportion of my work involves designing, building and managing websites for genre fiction authors.
I reckon I've got a pretty good idea by now of the sort of key elements that a good author website should ideally include:
- A full bibliography of the author's published work, preferably organised by chronological and/or series order.
- A biography section, with press-quality photo(s) if available.
- A regularly-updated news / news & views / blog section.
- Contact information, both for the author and their agent(s).
Those would seem to me to be the core essentials, but in the interests of research and development, I was wondering: what do you folks - as however occasional visitors to, rather than administrators of, author websites, or even as authors and writers yourselves - think are the next most important aspects of an author website?
Content, functionality, graphic design elements, add-ons, enhancements; whatever you think adds the most to your experience of visiting an author website as a reader / interviewer / publisher / researcher, whatever your role or remit might be.
And, conversely, is there anything that you regularly see on author websites that drives you mad, or that you think is largely superfluous to requirements?
Please feel free to discuss in the comments section and I'll post a round-up of the most interesting suggestions in a week or two.



