I Feel Bad for Criticizing Someone's Author Site

I veered off on a tangent yesterday while writing about the email I received from a scammer, who'd intended to plug his instructions into AI, not send them to me. It was funny, though. 

I took a peek at the website of one of the authors in his email, and immediately noticed some flaws. In the guy's defense, his designer probably told him the site was finished, and the author trusted him/her. This piece tells a different tale:

 

But dumb mistakes slip by all the time. Worse, some of them aren't even mistakes. 

I found a YouTube video from Thomas Umstattd a while back about building a book page for my author site. Before, I simply had a page that showed all my books, so the idea of highlighting the one I care about most was intriguing.

I took all his suggestions to heart--far too much. My page is loaded, and not in a good way. I realize that now. Read the article and know that I included everything even remotely possible to include. His advice was good; my interpretation of it was bad. If I accidentally stumbled upon that page, would I read all that? Of course not. 

(The saving grace is, no one visits my site.)

But I really worked on it. I utilized Canva and Whisk (while it was still free) to create little video clips. I built a Spotify playlist and embedded it. I designed mood boards with Canva. I (stupidly) paid for headshots. I drew up a character compendium and a list of book club questions.

And now, after all that, I realize the page is way over the top. 

So, who the heck am I to critique another author's site? I do wish he'd fix the "oops" above, though, for his own sake. 

The other author mentioned in the email has a decent site visually, but in scanning its contents, again I needed to point the finger at myself. The woman's bio is really, really long (and with bullet points). Mine, too, goes on for too long. Frankly, no potential reader is going to care, unless they're a stalker. Writing one's own bio is hard, but throwing in every non-interesting fact about oneself doesn't make it zing. I've read some fun bios, but those are few and far between. 

Overall, my site in its current form comes across as someone's who's trying too hard; an author who's desperate. (guilty!) Confident authors have confident websites. 

So, I apologize for singling a certain author out for his website. It's really none of my business, but what is my business is cleaning up my own act. I intend to do that.