Building an actress website

There is no separate kind of website for an actress. The document is the same: what you look like, what you sound like on camera, what you have done, and how somebody reaches you. Anyone who tells you it needs softer colors or a different structure is selling decoration.

What is genuinely different is smaller and more practical than that, and it comes down to two things. The word you use. And what you choose not to publish.

1. "Actor" or "actress" on your own site

Both words are in current professional use and the industry has not settled on one. The Academy Awards still name the category Actress. The SAG Awards renamed theirs to Female Actor. Plenty of working women describe themselves only as an actor, and plenty of others use actress without a second thought.

So print the one you use. Nobody has ever been passed over for the word on their own homepage, and a site that uses a word its owner does not like reads as somebody else's writing.

Two notes for the search side of it, since that is usually what the question is really about:

1. People search for both. If your name is on the page, your headshots have real alt text and your credits are in plain text rather than inside an image, you are findable either way. The word in your tagline is not what decides it.
2. Casting breakdowns use both too, along with "female", and they are searching their own databases rather than Google. What matters to that search is your representation, your union status and your age range, not your adjective.

2. Headshots, and how many

One image carries the first screen: current, your eyes, no heavy retouching. The test is whether somebody who met you yesterday would recognize it. A photograph that flatters you into a different casting bracket wastes everyone's afternoon, including yours.

Behind it, three to six more that show range: a commercial look, a dramatic look, and one that is simply you. Beyond about eight, the gallery stops being evidence and becomes a mood board.

Keep the crop consistent across the set. A page of headshots at six different zoom levels looks careless in a way that is hard to name but easy to feel.

3. The four things that have to be on it

Photos, reel, credits, contact. In that order, because that is the order the questions get asked: what do you look like, can you act, what have you done, how do I reach you.

Everything else is optional and most of it is a distraction. A resume that prints is worth more than a blog. A full breakdown of what belongs in each of the four is in what an acting portfolio is, and the eight tests a good one passes is the shortest way to check a site you already have.

4. What to leave off, which is the part nobody writes about

Your website is public, it is indexed, and it will be read by people you did not have in mind when you built it. That is the whole point of it. It also means a few details do not belong on it, and this is the question that comes up more than any other once a site is live.

1. No home address. There is no casting reason for it. If a form needs a location, your market is enough: "Los Angeles", not a street.
2. No personal mobile number. Your representation's number, or a contact form, or an email address you read. A published number gets dialed by people who are not casting anybody.
3. Not your home town plus your date of birth. Those two together are half of an identity check at a bank. See the next section for what to publish instead.
4. Nothing that locates you by routine. The studio where you teach on Tuesdays, the gym in the background of a photo, a child's school in a caption. Any one of them is harmless. Together they are a schedule.
5. Check what your photos carry. Phone pictures can hold the coordinates they were taken at. Most upload tools strip that and ours does, but if you are hosting images anywhere yourself, confirm it rather than assume it.

None of this is about being afraid of the internet. It is the same judgment as a resume: you hand over what the job needs and nothing it does not.

5. A playable age range, not a birth date

Give the range you can be cast in, for example 25 to 35. That is the number casting works from, it is the number your representation quotes, and it changes when your look changes rather than every January.

A date of birth on a public page does one job, which is to shorten the range somebody is willing to consider you for. Leave it off. If a submission platform requires it, that is a private field in their system, not a line on your own site.

6. Your name as the address, and keeping it current

yourname.com, said out loud in one breath. It goes on a resume and into conversation, so it has to survive being spelled once over a bad phone line. If your name is taken, the domain finder works through the variations that still read professionally.

Then the test that decides more than every design decision put together: is it current? A site whose last credit is three years old does not read as a neglected website. It reads as a neglected career, and that impression lands before anybody reads a word. Ask of any way of building one: what does it take to add a credit, and will you still be doing it willingly on the tenth?