An author website should look like your books feel. Within a few seconds of landing on your homepage, readers should sense your genre and see a clear path to your books.
When deciding how your author website should look, these are the six things to get right:
- A strong first impression
- Colors & contrast that enhance readability
- Design consistency
- Engaging content
- Reader experience
- Easy-to-understand navigation
You already know how to set the tone and pull readers into a story. A website asks you to do the same thing with design, and that’s a lot to get right when you’re not sure what an author website is supposed to look like.
At Rocket Expansion, my team and I have built hundreds of websites for bestselling and debut authors. So everything below comes from what we’ve seen work. I’ll walk you through each element so your site feels like your brand and gets readers to your books.
Looking good isn’t enough. Your website needs to fit your brand, speak to your readers, and capture the mood of your genre.
And if you’d rather not design it yourself, you can check out our author website services here.
1. A Strong First Impression
A lot goes into building an author website, but readers notice how it looks first.
People judge books by their covers, and websites by their intros.
Once a reader lands on your home page, they decide within about five seconds whether they belong on your site.
Don’t let those five seconds go to a blank screen while the site loads. Page speed comes before every design choice, because a beautiful site does nothing if readers leave before it appears.
The first hero section should confirm they’re in the right place and give them a reason to keep scrolling.
Your brand and atmosphere should be clear and obvious. Ask yourself, “What do I want readers to think about when they think about my books?”
For example, a plot-twisty dark fantasy writer with spunk, or a sassy contemporary romance writer with a finger on the pulse of modern couple problems. This idea should inform your design and style choices.
And those design and style choices will feed into your all-important website purpose: intriguing your readers.
Use imagery and copy that talk directly to your readers’ needs:
- Non-fiction: Speaking directly to the problems they have and how you’ll solve them.
- Fiction: The type of escapism you depict in your stories and how you can fulfil readers’ fantasies through your stories and style of writing.
Be sure to add a call-to-action that leads to either your popular series, debut book, services page, or newsletter sign-up. Readers need to know where you want them to go!
To show you what I mean, here’s a fantasy website intro example, designed by my team for Gregory Kontaxis, which oozes with atmosphere:
2. Colors & Contrast That Enhance Readability
If you want your author website to pop and the most important parts to stand out, use a smart color scheme and contrast.
The color scheme should match your books and brand. Spunky writer? Bright pops of colors (without being cliché, of course). Twisty, dark fiction? Grim, darker, gritty colors.
Contrast requires balancing your color palette, choosing each color’s contrast to add professionalism, and keeping the site from looking muddy with hues that make the content hard to read.
Keep the backgrounds behind your book covers simple or highly contrasted so the covers stand out.
We used contrast on Tim Sullivan’s Thriller website to make his cover pop forward:
3. Design Consistency
It’s easy to get caught up in new ideas that come along, or forget the style you initially went for.
But for readers to feel at home as they click around, every page from your homepage to your about page needs to feel consistent.
That doesn’t mean identical layouts. Your pages should look like siblings, not twins.
Keep the same fonts, color palette, and style, and adjust the layout to suit each page.
For example, your contact page will have a form, so there’s no need for extravagant designs around it when the contact form is the focus. You can, however, put extravagant designs on your map pages to immerse the reader in your world.
4. Engaging Content
The type of content you use, such as blogs, bios, activities, and videos, should be consistent with your brand and genre.
For example, if you’re a life coach, your blogs and videos need to speak to your experience and advice around the topic.
Typography plays a part here too. Your headings can get creative and match your genre, like a script font on a romance author website, but body text should stay simple and easy to read.
Your site’s written content sets the tone of your site the same way your prose sets the pacing of a book, so treat it as part of the design.
See how we used typography and related content to build a consistent non-fiction website for Joe Hirsch:
5. Reader Experience
Build each website page around what you want your readers to find.
For non-fiction, it could be info on your next events, and videos showing you in action. For fiction, they’d want to see character descriptions, updates about your writing journey, fun recipes from your world, maps, glossaries, reading order lists, etc.
Include content that will engage the reader and keep them on your site, and tempt them to come back for more.
That includes the practical side: buttons that are easy to tap, links that work, and pages that display properly on mobile. Basically, make sure your website works well and is optimized.
K.C. Ale understands her readers and provides them with content they love: deleted scenes! Check out the unpublished content page we built:
6. Easy-to-Understand Navigation
Good navigation lets readers find anything in a click or two:
- Put your main pages in the menu, with dropdowns for series or extras.
- Keep the page count lean: the essentials, plus a few extras for readers.
- Use your homepage to preview your most important sections and invite readers to click through.
Need some inspiration for how to go about navigation on your author website? Check out our portfolio.
Still deciding which pages to include? See what should be on your author website.
Ready To Design Your Author Website?
You should now have a better idea of what your author website should look like, but I know there’s still lots of work left to do.
Even with a good guide, building a website on your own is no easy feat.
If you want to skip the fuss and continue writing your book while a professional handles the techy stuff, you’re in the right place!
We’ve built hundreds of author websites for all types of authors, from established bestselling authors to debut authors stepping into the industry for the first time. We know what it takes to make a website that pops and makes waves online.
Simply inquire here to get in touch. We’ll have a call, discuss your goals, and see if we’ll be a good fit.
