Onstage > Employment

Websites part deux

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PSMKay:
Our old websites thread has reached 10 pages, and has therefore been locked. Here is the sequel.

As a reminder, this thread is for critiquing sites, not for promoting yourself. If you have made a personal website for your stage management career and would like feedback please post here.

MandalynM:
Thanks Kay!

Hello all, here is my newly (and still under construction) webpage. Any edits would be awesome. I appreciate your time!

Mandi

www.mandalynstevens.com

Dart:
Since we've gotten to Part II (The Webbening?), and Part I was started almost seven years ago, I'd like to ask anew: What website hosts and/or builders, do y'all like? Has this changed over time, as hosts have died and been born?

I am more than ready to pay for my website, but I'm more inclined toward builders than hosts-with-no-editor because I can't create a professional website on my own and don't really have the money to invest on a graphic designer right now. In the other hand, though, I'm seeing some sites charge an outrageous $16/mo just because they have a pretty editor or no ads.

I've been looking at Wix and Wordpress.com this morning - Wix looks nice, though they have some awful reviews re tech support, and Wordpress is all blog-based (I know .org isn't) and won't let me really play with the editor unless I pay for it (I'd love it if they let me play but not save...) Does anyone have experience with either?

MandalynM:
I just built my site. I registered my domain and hosting through namecheap.com. Under there c-panel (which namecheap will give you the log-in and such when you register) I used Wordpress that I installed from the panel. It was surprisingly easy, as I am not a web developer at all. I paid 57 dollars for the year and wordpress was free. There was some coding I did to add PDFs of my resume and paperwork samples. If you need that code, feel free to message me and I can talk you through it a bit. If you use a wordpress template, I suggest disabling the comments. Don't upload any pictures until you disable them, or people can comment on your pictures.

If you want to see what I did on wordpress, my website is mandalynstevens.com (the picture of myself is being changed as soon as I get my head shots)

It wasn't too bad, and I am very happy with my site.

Mandi

PSMKay:
I have not worked with Wix. I do use the open-source Wordpress for a couple of sites and am pretty happy with it. SMF is easier to work with but that may be due to a 5+ year discrepancy in my own familiarity with the code.

I've written guest content for Wordpress.com blogs and found that the content creation interfaces were great but the design back-end was pretty opaque. However, if you're fine using a boilerplate theme (which I sometimes am and sometimes am not...ahem...) it should be great. There's plenty of themes out there. It's also remarkably easy to convert Wordpress from a "blog" format to a portfolio format.

The nice thing about Wordpress is the heavy focus on SEO. Now, you still need to keep your keywords in mind when you're creating your content, but for the most part the search engines will pick up something posted to my WP sites long before they pick up something published in most other formats.

SMNetwork and all my other sites use Linode for hosting, which is a mid-to-high range VPS host. I am over-the-moon happy with them so far. Prior to Linode we were using InMotion Hosting, which was fine for a basic site with modest traffic. I still refer a lot of my design clients to them. Once we got to a certain traffic level they gave us the boot, though, which will be the case with many of the "cheap" hosts.

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