Hi Bonnie,
I greatly appreciate your columns on making yourself Googleable and fully utilizing Google Alerts. I did want to comment on your advice to put misspellings and leading questions on an actor’s web page and hide them by matching the font background. While the majority of visitors to an actor’s web site will never see these words, browsers on mobile phones do not always uphold the color choices on websites and may display the text. More importantly however, any blind visitors browsing the website on a screen reader will have the text, misspellings and all, read out to them aloud. (Imagine hearing a computer speak in sequence “Bonie,” “Bonnnie,” “Bonne,” etc.) I recommend that any actor who wishes to use this technique review the audience for their web site and make sure they are not potentially inconveniencing a portion of their visitors.
There’s a wonderful article on the website A List Apart entitled “High Accessibility Is Effective Search Engine Optimization” that discusses ways to make a website both more accessible to visitors with disabilities and at the same time making the information on the website easier to find on Google. In short, the best way an actor can make their website findable by others is to create an accessible site with a clear, well-branded message. And then have it linked to by popular online columnists. 😉
I love it! This is awesome and brilliant and I am so grateful to you for writing in. I hadn’t even considered the concept of a screen reader for the visually impaired. Of course a site with misspellings planted in the main page would be a horrible place to visit in those conditions! Thank you for the very thoughtful email and great link. Awesome!
This reminds me that I wanted to mention how many visitors really are accessing websites via Safari on iPhone or other phone-based web browsers. So many actors go to great expense to design fancy, Flash-based websites which look super cool on a computer, but are completely useless to those of us who do most of our browsing on our handheld devices.
If you ever watch a group of industry types gathered together, talking about their favorite new “finds,” you’ll realize how essential it is that you offer your website visitors a non-flash version of your site, easily accessed from the main page. We huddle together over our iPhones saying, “You’ve gotta see this kid!” and we’ll head to his or her IMDb-Pro page or to his or her profile on Breakdown Services. Both of these sites work beautifully on an iPhone (and in fact the reason I traded in my Blackberry for an iPhone in 2007 was specifically because Gary Marsh showed me the Breakdowns interface on his iPhone. It was perfect. Done deal. iPhone bought the next day). But when we go to visit an actor’s website, where presumably all the goodies live (and where the actor controls the spin, the vibe, the branding) and get a big ol’ question mark on the screen, we know we’ve entered a Flash zone and there still aren’t smart phones smart enough to handle that action (yet). Even if your site is primarily HTML, if your video content isn’t linked to YouTube or something that our phones can easily play, you’re still missing out on showing your audience what you can do at the exact moment we want to see it — and show it to others.
Bottom line: Think it through. Consider your audiences (all of them) and how they’re using your site (or how they would use your site, if you would only let them). Yeah, cool tech stuff is fun and all that, but simpler is better much of the time and in an industry where we’ll move on to the next actor — whose stuff we can see quickly and easily — you’re smart to make sure we never leave your page!
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/001018.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.