The author website that earns its keep

A working author site does three things: it captures an email address, it makes a producer's job easy, and it tells a first time visitor who you are in under ten seconds.

Everything else, the long biography, the photo gallery, the list of every festival you attended, belongs on a secondary page or nowhere at all.

Start with the capture. A single reader magnet, one field, one button, above the fold. Then the press kit: bios in three lengths, high resolution photos, topic list, and a contact route that does not go through a contact form nobody checks.

The third job is positioning, and it is the one most sites fail. One sentence that says what you write and who it is for. Write it, cut it in half, then put it at the top.