I have a website as a totally passive way to get my presence out there. I put it on my business cards and my resume and frankly, it's there (as a poster above stated) to attempt to impress those who might hire me. I figure it's also a way of cheap advertising. The website itself does little for me otherwise -- although that could be because its prior incarnation *sucked* and was really difficult to find AND was jumbled in with pictures of pets and fanfiction and various other things. Yeah. Professional? NOT!!! I was totally shooting myself in the foot even if somebody *did* come along to look
Nobody's ever called me and said 'Hey, I saw your website online! I want to hire you!' but every once in a great while somebody will say, 'Oh, you have a website? Cool, what is it?'.
However, this time around I hope to be more organized and to have a separate page for separate stuff instead of lumping it all together. I'd like to have a separate page for each show that I have photos/reviews etc for, but I haven't got enough of that stuff
So I think I might group by catagory rather than by production.
I use 2mhost.com -- cheap ($2/month and $8/year for my domain name) --, with excellent uptime. I have another site with them for my paranormal hobby and it's NEVER gone down. I always get my email (they provide free email forwarding . . . if you wanted an email address to appear on your website like, admin@I'mAStageManager.com you could set it up to forward to your home address, pookiebear@hotmail.com, or whatever, for free. That keeps your personal email address off the Net and keeps spam down, not to mention retaining your professionalism.), they have decent tech support, and they have all kinds of emails. It's up to you to learn HTML code, but honestly, that's not hard. There's plenty of tutorials online --and if you don't want to code yourself, 2mhost provides a thing so it will do it for you.
At the moment my new stage manager website isn't up yet because I just paid 2mhost today ($31 for a whole year . . . a decent investment, I figure) and sometimes it can take a while for them to set up stuff on their end -- two to six hours, they say on their website, but I've found it's more like 12 to 24 hours -- so that I can upload to their server and such, but in theory it should be up and with enough stuff to keep folks' interest by Halloween. I hope to have the basic skeleton of the site up in two weeks. Since I do all the HTML myself, and am a college student, and work my local RenFest now, there's not a lot of time to futz with a website.
I put most of my energies into doing the best job that I can for the company that hires me, networking for new leads on new shows, and actively looking for work, when I'm not in school or on a date with my special somebody. The website is important, but a tiny percentage of the overall self-advertisement thing.
Whitewater (Is this my first post? I think so!)