For our final installment of the series on actor websites, let’s get down to it: Do casting directors, producers, directors, agents, and managers even look at actors’ websites? Well, yes and no. Nearly seven years ago, when I started interviewing casting directors for Back Stage West, a standard question was, “Do you use alternative casting methods?” (“Alternative” was basically code for “turning on your computer and connecting to the Internet.”) By the time Casting Qs: A Collection of Casting Director Interviews was published four years ago, I’d complied statistics on the topic of online casting. At that time, only 54% of the casting directors I had interviewed would even consider going online to view an actor’s materials. About 3% actually preferred electronic casting to hard copy submissions. Cut to the May 2005 panel I moderated for the ATAS, during which every single casting director and agent spoke about the Internet’s vital importance to an actor’s career. As we close in on 2007, nearly 85% of all television projects are accepting electronic submissions while commercial casting is 99% online.

So, if you put off having a website a few years ago, I could totally understand it. Today? Not having an online presence might cost you work. Tomorrow? I’d imagine not having a YouTube channel and MySpace fanclub could keep you from inking a development deal or commanding the type of salary that only someone with a rabid online fanbase could earn. At the very least, your IMDb page must feature your headshot. Remember, as I mentioned in my post-panel column last year: One of the biggest frustrations casting directors mentioned was attempting to show an actor’s credits and photo to a producer or director using a link to IMDb-Pro and having that actor’s image represented by the “no photo submitted” icon. The expense to have an IMDb photo with your listing is worth every penny, according to the panelists.

Joan Blair, an actor who I simply adore (as evidenced by the number of times I’ve cast her so far in my career), had this to say about the industry and the Internet: I still find that most CDs say being on Actors Access and SpeedReels is more important than a personal website. Although, I think a personal website comes in REALLY handy for marketing yourself to directors and producers. I think, in the next six months, we’ll see more and more CDs going to our personal websites. Up ’til now, I’ve heard many comments that they find they sometimes don’t work very well. Now that most people are on a high-speed connection and the technology has improved, I think many more people will be willing to check out our sites. Also, MySpace and YouTube have educated a lot more people who have not been that involved with the Internet.

Industry/Internet Dos and Don’ts

When Shea Weaver submitted her site to me for the first column in this series, she mentioned that she actually researched what it was that folks in the industry wanted to see when visiting actors’ websites. I asked her to elaborate on that research and, sure enough, she did! Here are her well-researched dos and don’ts for actor websites, per a dozen or more casting directors she surveyed.

I went to several workshops and basically made a list of what casting directors liked and what they hated. My main goal of my website is to keep it simple, keep it accessible, and keep it quick. I wanted people to be able to access any of my info from the first page, and I wanted to have everything available there that I would normally carry with me to an audition. I found a lot of similar likes/dislikes between an actors website and an actors reel.

These are the main items I’ve heard repeated by different casting directors.

Reducing the Spam that Comes with Having a Website

“This is probably one of the most important things I can tell you. Few people realize that there are these awful little Internet creatures called spam bots. They continuously search the Internet, and on each web page that they find, they will search the HTML code looking for email addresses, like something@something.com format. Once they find it, they put it into their spam database and spammers can use them or sell your email address to other spammers. So you end up getting a huge amount of spam just because your email address is on a web page. Fortunately, there is a way around this and it is SO EASY. You can ENCRYPT your email address into the HTML code so that it will display on screen as your email address, and it can even act as a link that you can click on to send an email. BUT, in the actual HTML code, the email address IS NOT THERE! If you look at the code, you will find about 15 lines of gobbledygook characters and numbers. This is what gets encoded as an email address in the browser window. And guess what! You don’t even need to pay money for extra software to encrypt your email address. I use an encoder from Automatic Labs. All you have to do is fill in the form with you email address (and you can even use an alternate text to display instead of your email address), and the encoder will give you the HTML code to paste into your own HTML code wherever you want your email address to display. It so SO SIMPLE! ” — Jay Prichard

More about Domain Name Registration

Register your domain name exactly like your SAG name if possible. Always go for a .com address if you can get one, with .net as the next best choice among top-level domains. Consider adding “the actor” if your domain name is already taken (for example, SamJones.com becomes SamJonesTheActor.com). Using the “other” domains (.info, .tv, .name) is not always a great idea.

“Dot info is a banned top-level domain name at various places. Tons of spam robots use .info (which isn’t to say they don’t use other top-level domain names, including .com). Consequently numerous sites and spam devices block registrations and/or email coming from a .info address. There are others that are commonly banned, mostly some other country top-level domains, in particular .ru (Russia) and .de (Germany). When I say banned, I don’t mean completely, of course, but many just don’t allow them in. Another situation is ‘free email’ services. Yahoo, Hotmail, etc., are often banned and that one is thorny because those services also have paid-for premium accounts which wind up banned because of the domain. More and more hosting companies are beginning to discontinue “catch-all” email. Catch-all is where you can permit your domain to receive email even though you have not set up an exact address. For instance, you might have info@yourdomain.com as your primary address. But if you permit catch-all, then email addressed to help@yourdomain.com, webmaster@yourdomain.com, support@yourdomain.com, or anything addressed to yourdomain.com will still get through to you; you don’t have to set up specific email addresses and is why it’s called “catch-all.” But this is a source of massive spam overloads because such things as xzyrs@yourdomain.com, eatme@yourdomain.com, freedrugs@yourdomain.com, or whatever will also get through to you. No more, however, as hosting companies do away with catch-all as an option. With such hosting companies you must set up a specific email address/account for each address and any mail addressed to your domain but not addressed to the specific address will now get bounced back automatically. A good thing in my opinion but people with hosted sites who’ve been receiving email without a dedicated email address for each address might stop receiving legit email they were receiving in the past. If they’ve been receiving email addressed to any address other than their primary, they should check to see that they have dedicated email addresses in place for these rather than rely on catch-all.” — Bob Brody

“Okay, so you registered your domain name, and you ENCODED your email address display on your website. So you should be safe from those pesky spam bots I talked about above. Well, not so fast. As it turns out, those domain registration sites, like Network Solutions and Who Is, will let you search for domain names. And if the domain name is already registered, it will show you the contact information of the company of person to whom it is registered… INCLUDING their EMAIL ADDRESS. They do this so that if you really, really want that domain name, you can contact the domain name owner and make an offer to buy it from them. So can you guess what this means? It means that those pesky spam bots can find your email address on the domain registration sites, and the spam bots know it, too. So they go a-looking there. This means that when you register your domain, your email address is exposed. Fortunately, for a nominal fee, some web hosting providers offer a PRIVATE DOMAIN NAME REGISTRATION option. Mine cost me about $1.50 per month.” — Jay Prichard

One bit of warning on that last bit. You’ll want to watch out for horribly inflated fees for “private domain registration.” Some hosts actually include this for free. If your host/designer/actor web-building service is charging a lot for this, you’re being scammed and should take your business elsewhere. Yeah, being spammed is a pain, but being scammed in the name of preventing spam isn’t much better.

In Closing

If nothing else has come across in this three–part series on actor websites, I hope you understand that a simple, professional, well-branded site in support of your acting career is going to serve you best. No need to create a site that makes us feel like we’re trapped at your house watching home movies that really only entertain you. And, if it’s your profession we’re talking about here, then what is the message you’re sending with an unprofessional website anyway? If you’re not taking pride in your materials — headshot, reel, resumé, website, yourself — you’re telling us you don’t take this career seriously. A website is a lot like a demo reel in terms of developing others’ impression of you. Until you are ready to have an excellent reel to showcase your work, don’t have one. Similarly, until your website is truly professional-looking, consider parking your URL at an all-in-one page like this and this. Yes, it’s a very simple format, but since you can actually damage your professional reputation with poor content and design, it’s better to just deliver the basic info until you’re really ready to launch your brand online.

Once your site is gorgeous and ready for liftoff, be sure to add your website link to your IMDb page and include the URL on your resumé, postcard, and business card. Put a link in the signature file of your email account. Oh, and here’s a fun fact: You most likely do not need to include WWW on your printed materials or in your links. Most sites resolve without that prefix. Try it!

Thank you to everyone who helped me pull this series together! I hope to hear from you with official announcements of website launches (or re-launches) based on some of what you’ve learned here. To those of you whose sites I did not feature in this series, please know that I am still very grateful to you for having volunteered them for the critiques! I’m so pleased to have an abundance of content provided by such eager-to-share readers. Continue to share your toys! It’s good karma!

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/000651.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.