A good website should load immediately, should be designed in such a way that the user can learn all they need to learn within a few seconds and should be completely navigatible within 3 mouse clicks. RESEARCH FROM GOOGLE STATES THAT MOST PEOPLE WILL CLICK AWAY FROM A WEBSITE IF IT TAKES MORE THAN 4 SECONDS TO OPEN! THEREFORE, WEBSITES MUST BE FAST TO LOAD... Don't get seduced by blocks and blocks of text, clever animations, splash pages, high quality downloads that take forever to happen etc. Just tell the person browsing what they need to know and tell them really quickly! REMEMBER, SOMEONE VIEWING YOUR SITE WILL BROWSE THE SITE, NOT READ IT! In fact, we call the programs that look at websites WEB BROWSERS not WEB READERS. Think of your site as a glossy coffee-table book or a glossy magazine - DON'T (for reasons of vanity or any other reason) put up reams and reams of text, fancy flash animations, splash pages, plugins etc just because it can be done. Doing this will irritate and bore the viewer and will make them just click off your site to go to something less demanding... It was Lord Beaverbrook who used to give his journalists who wrote for his newspapers the advice "NO SENTENCE LONGER THAN SEVEN WORDS, NO PARAGRAPH LONGER THAN THREE SENTENCES". REMEMBER THIS!!! Your website is where you can sell yourself, come across as really professional. It is also an excellent way of increasing what Marketeer's call YOUR BELOW THE LINE PRESENCE. In Advertising, the identity of a BRAND is divided into two categories. For example, take the VOLVO car (I speak from experience here having pitched for the job of launching the Volvo's XC90 4 by 4 car - I got down to the last two!):
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OK, HOW DOES ALL THIS "ABOVE and BELOW THE LINE" STUFF RELATE TO ME AS AN ACTOR?
A well designed website can tell the viewer so much more than a CV and a covering letter. It is a perfect medium to show your other talents (maybe you are good at Voice Overs or are a gifted and trained dancer, mime artist, stand up comedian, performance artist, writer, director, etc etc). It is also where you can demonstrate how you would be perceived when people hire you - your "BELOW THE LINE" image, i.e. your professionality, your attitude to your work, your self-perception etc. Hopefully, it will be your ABOVE THE LINE image that will get you the casting - i.e. your CV, headshot and covering letter. At that casting, your talent will be judged and someone hopefully will make some sort of decision about your being "RIGHT FOR THE PART". In the covering letter and at the casting, you might want to mention your website and suggest that they look at it if they are interested in you. Should this happen, what you would be wanting to do is reinforce your BELOW THE LINE image. DO NOT expect your website to help you leapfrog over a pile of CVs and get you a casting. Websites, unlike Headshots, should not be thought of as being targeted at Casting Directors. The UK is way behind the USA when it comes to pro-active Actors and their embrace of Information Technology. The UK Industry has a certain way of working... Simply put, a UK Casting Director will rarely focus on websites. Instead they much prefer the standard approach of a short CV, a standard 10 by 8 headshot and a covering letter as well as going out (or sending people to go out) and watch an Actor on stage. Why a visual medium such as ours should operate in this way is a strange and peculiar thing but there is no point in expecting it to change any time soon. Instead, treat your website as a way of raising your profile, your "industrial credibility" if you like. How professional does it look to send out emails from contact*at*yourname.com rather than using a Hotmail address? How professional does it look to include in an email a hyperlink to your website where an interested party can learn about you or even watch a low or a high resolution clip of your past work? If you are reading this list, then you are a struggling Actor. ANYTHING that helps raise your profile, makes you look more professional and credible is a GOOD THING. Just don't expect your website to do a job the industry doesn't ask of it. Now a great many people can build websites but the most important thing has to be make damn sure that whoever is building your site for you really does know what your target market is and what the site MUST to do. Also, a website needs to be hosted, i.e. you need to rent some space from a Hosting Company who will store your files for you and allow it to be seen on the internet. Expect to pay about £5 per month for this and your domain name registration should be free but will cost you perhaps£5-10 per year to be registered at the Hosting Company as your site domain. Therefore, expect to pay perhaps £60-70 per year to run your website with a decent Hosting Company. This should include all your email traffic and website traffic. There are hundreds of Hosting Companies out there and I use www.1and1.co.uk because their technical support department recently won an award for being the most helpful... Either CLICK HERE or click on the banner below to go to their website
Go to TOP THE STRENGTHS OF OWNING AND RUNNING YOUR OWN DOMAIN NAME A domain name is the technical name given to a web address or web identity. There are all sorts of conventions concerning domain names but the ones ending in .com tend to be for businesses or commercial identies, .org for public bodies, .gov for Government stuff etc... You can also have regional identities like .co.uk etc. I own several including christophernicholson.com and christophernicholson.co.uk. I pay around £9 a year to own these domains and they will remain mine unless I wish to sell or give them away. Therefore, no one else can come along and start a website with the address www.christophernicholson.com or .co.uk. Apart from having my own name as my web identity, I also send and receive emails from my domain in the same way that you might use HOTMAIL. This is because I've set up a WEBMAIL system to run with my website (costs me no extra money to do this). Therefore, all my emails sent to info@christophernicholson.com are sent directly to my private email address (which means I can pick them up at home in my office and on my BlackBerry) but also I can access them (to both send and receive) from any computer anywhere in the world that has internet access. It is SO professional to own your own domain name and it says so much more to send and receive emails from info@christophernicholson.com as opposed to cnicholson347@hotmail.co.uk You can use the box below to check if your own domain name is available:
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MYSPACE/FACEBOOK etc vs. MY OWN WEBSITE It is very possible for even the most basic computer user to create a MYSPACE/FACEBOOK etc page. This has led to a number of Actors creating MYSPACE pages instead of websites in the hope that this will provide them with an adequate internet presence. IF YOU CHOOSE TO SET UP A MYSPACE PAGE INSTEAD OF A PROPER WEBSITE, DON'T EXPECT TO GET THE SAME RESULTS!!! MYSPACE is designed as an informal networking device, aimed specifically at the youth users of the internet. Some companies wishing to appear "cool" do use MYSPACE as a marketing tool but honestly, no one from the Industry is going to take a MYSPACE page as seriously as a professionally designed and independently hosted website. It's all about perception - if you wish to be seen as someone who is just playing at acting, then have a MYSPACE page as your only internet presence. If you wish to be seen as a professional, then get a professional webpage. If you really want to be on MYSPACE, then set up the page but remember, Jodie Foster and Kevin Spacey don't run their own MYSPACE pages...what does that tell you??? Think about it this way, would you rather have a professional headshot taken by someone who knows what they are doing or would you prefer to use a photo taken in a Passport Photo Machine at the Post Office?
Go to TOP REMEMBER, WHEN IT COMES TO WEBSITES... 1) Treat your website like an advertisement for yourself. Get an understanding of your BRAND as an Actor and break this this down into two categories:
2) Keep your site visual at all times - make sure whoever builds it for you has a background in advertising NOT just computers! You want to sell yourself as an Actor NOT the talents of the Web-Designer and their ability to create flashy websites... 3) REMEMBER THE GOLDEN RULE OF ADVERTISING: "What are you trying to say and who are you trying to say it to"
THIS ARTICLE ON COLOUR THEORY MAY BE INTERESTING TO YOU...
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