A Complete Rebuild of the Dashboard Behind Every Free Actor Website
Today we are switching on a completely rebuilt admin for every free actor website on the platform. It is the biggest change we have made to the product since launch, and unlike most rewrites, it is one you will feel immediately: pages open instantly, the menu is shorter, and the things actors do every week are no longer buried three clicks deep.
Why we rebuilt it instead of patching it
The old admin grew one feature at a time over more than a decade. That is not a criticism of it. It is simply what happens when a tool is useful for long enough. But it meant a new user signing up to build an actor website landed on a screen with forty-odd options and no obvious first step, and an experienced user updating a single credit had to reload the entire page to do it.
We could have kept adding to it. Instead we listed every task an actor genuinely performs on their own site over a year: upload new headshots, swap the reel, add a credit, change the contact email, check who has been in touch. Then we designed around that list rather than around the database tables.
What is different
- It does not reload. The admin is now a single application. Switching from your credits to your galleries is instant because only the data changes, not the whole page.
- The menu is grouped by intent. Profile, Website, Media, Career and Promotion. If you are looking for something, you no longer need to know which internal system it belongs to.
- Counters are honest. The number on the bell is the number of things actually waiting for you. That sounds obvious. It was not always true before.
- It works on a phone. Not a stripped-down version. The same admin, laid out for a small screen, because plenty of headshots get uploaded from a phone in a car park after a shoot.
Nothing you have built has moved
Every page, photo, credit, video and contact message is exactly where it was. Your public site did not change at all, your address did not change, and your domain name still points where it always did. Only the room you work in has been redecorated.
If you had a design applied from the template catalog, it stayed applied. If you were mid-way through the setup checklist, your progress carried over.
What this unlocks next
The rebuild is not the feature. It is the thing that makes the next two years of features possible. Because the admin now loads data separately from the page, we can add tools without making anything else slower, which is the trap the old version fell into.
Over the coming months you will see this show up as a much faster dashboard, a reorganized profile, and a single screen for pages and navigation. Each of those was effectively impossible in the old admin.
A good moment to look at your site with fresh eyes
Whenever a tool gets easier to use, it is worth spending twenty minutes on the parts of your site you have been meaning to fix. Our own advice on keeping an actor website fresh holds up: a site that was accurate two years ago is a site that is wrong today.
Start with the three things casting looks at first. Is your headshot current? Is your reel the one you would actually want seen? Does your contact information reach you?
Getting in
Log in as you always have. There is nothing to install, nothing to migrate and nothing to pay. If you do not have a site yet, you can create an actor website for free and land straight in the new admin. If something looks wrong, the help section has been rewritten alongside it, and the contact form reaches a real person.
