This week’s Your Turn will be a collection of emails I received about this series on websites, just to round things up.
Wow. Great advice. I Googled myself. IMDb is first. But it’s followed by 15 pages (fifteen! PAGES!) of other links, most to online reviews of shows, etc., but also to my activist activities. It’s a lot of info, and all in pretty random order. And THAT’s just if you put my name in quotes when you search. If NOT, you get even more pages that seem to have the real me mixed in with many others including a British stripper (!) and some yoga instructor in New Mexico or someplace. Who knew?!? I think it is indeed time for an official website!
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Regarding the section about saving source code: Learning is one thing, but it should be clear that stealing is another. It’s easy to copy and paste, changing a little here and there, but someone put work and thought into the original to NOT be like everyone else. If someone else goes beyond “playing around” to using that design as their own, it takes away from the original site, making it another “cookie-cutter” template, that which is then described in the article’s following paragraph. As the section stands, some might take it as instructions and the okay (“web server somewhere far, far away” so no one will find out, and it’s just for “fun”) to plagiarize. I’m not against learning from a site, but there are other ways to get free script or layouts.
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One other thing that your readers might be able to use, re: their websites. My wife and I started our own Internet business years back, and I spent a couple years learning how to code, and learning all of the ins and outs of SEO (search engine optimization) for websites, and how to market on the web. As a result I came across a real gem for submitting your website to the search engines which I have been using for years successfully. It is a terrific free tool to get your site submitted to ALL search engines. It’s very simple to use. The company offers this service for free because it attracts people to their site, and some of those people will also use their “pay for” SEO services, which actors rarely need. But the submission tool is terrific. It’s free, it works, and it shouldn’t be used any more than once a month so that you don’t get banned from submitting from the major search engines.
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Hi Bonnie and I love all your articles — very, very, helpful! By the way, you’re my friend on MySpace!! Loved your articles on websites and am very happy that you mentioned ActorWebs.com. I truly feel they are the best I’ve ever seen, and I’m extremely happy to be with them. Amy Russ, who owns and maintains the company is wonderful, and is always very friendly, and enormously helpful whenever you need her help! It’s incredible the knowledge she possess on how a website should look, and she just seems to know the pulse of the industry and what people are looking for!
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PS: The awesome folks who allow me to toss a whole bunch of words out there for actors every week have given me a holiday, so I’ll be back on 1 January 2007, with a new column on launching your best year yet (as well as a new edition of The Actors Voice: POV). Just wanted to take a quick moment to say THANK YOU to Gary Marsh and Bob Brody for providing this platform, to the dozens of actors who contributed to articles over the past year, to the many actors who reached out with emails of questions or comments for YOUR TURN, and to you readers who keep coming back for more! I’m so glad that you’ve gotten enough out what we do here to visit every week to see what’s next. I’m excited about a beautifully fulfilling 2007 for us all. Thanks for letting me share in your process, you wonderful creative types. I celebrate you!
Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!
Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/000650.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.