You’ve decided to have the best darn actor website created for you. You want it to look great and showcase your talent to best effect. With your mind’s eye, you envision an awesome, animated altar to all things wonderful about you and your acting.
And believe me, there are plenty of web designers who would be happy to create this flashy, stylish website for you … with no regard to whether it helps you reach your goals or not.
So, before you hire your website designer … make sure you understand what various web features can and can not do for you and your website. To help you make an informed choice, here are five tempting web features you may want to use … and why you might want to avoid them.
1. Flash Animation
Those flash animated sites look really sleek, right? Having flash animation on your website will give it that more sophisticated and professional look, right?
But at what cost?
If you’re going to use Flash, use it sparingly. Although Google’s ability to crawl this type of animated content has improved, putting too much of your content in Flash can reduce the search engine optimization of your website, slow down the load time and even make that content inaccessible to some people. Flash has also been known to reduce navigational effectiveness and turn people off before they’ve even gotten to the “meat” of your website.
Remember, if your website is meant to help you reach casting directors … they aren’t going to care about pretty animation, but they will care if they have to wade through a lot of irrelevant animation just to get to your head shots and resume.
2. Image Overload
Yes, you want images on your website. You’ll want some decent head shots and even some representative action and character shots. If you’re trying to appeal to your fan base, you’ll even want event and fan shots. But there is such as thing as too much.
Keep your pages simple, with only the number of images that are necessary to support the goal of that page. Too many images on a web-page can slow the load time.
Also, when adding images, be sure that they are optimized for the Web (72dpi) and use the “alt” attribute to increase the chances of your website being found. You’d be surprise how much traffic you can get from a Google Image search!
3. Complicated, Fancy, “Artsy” Navigation
Why does a website need navigation? So people can find the content they are looking for! Your web designer might try to talk you into a really cool looking navigational scheme, but be careful. Make sure that it is easy to use and understand. The last thing you want is to loose a gig because the casting director couldn’t navigate your website and find what he or she was looking for.
