Pages and navigation used to be two different ideas in the admin, which meant creating a page and then going somewhere else to make it visible. They are now one screen. Add a page, name it, choose its type, and it appears in your menu where you put it.
The structure of an actor website is not complicated
Most working websites for actors have between five and nine pages. Home, About, Resume, Photos, Video, Contact, and then one or two that reflect what you specifically do: voice work, writing, teaching, a current project. The hard part was never deciding what to include. It was the plumbing.
The new screen lists every page you have, in the order they appear in your menu, with a switch for visible or hidden and a label for what type of page it is. That list is your site. There is nothing else to check.
Page types, briefly
- Standard pages pull from a part of your profile: your credits, your galleries, your training, your press.
- Custom pages are blank and yours. See writing anything you like.
- Resume pages can be a download rather than something to browse. See the resume page type.
- Link items will be able to point somewhere else entirely, which is covered in external links in your menu when it lands.
Hidden is not deleted
A page you switch off keeps its content and disappears from the menu. This is the right way to handle a project page between projects, or a teaching page during a season when you are not teaching. You are not throwing work away, and you can bring it back in one click.
Actually deleting a page is now a separate and deliberate action, which we wrote about in a safer way to delete a page.
Fewer pages is usually better
Since this screen makes adding pages easy, it is worth saying the obvious: a nine-page site where every page is complete beats a fifteen-page site where six are empty. An empty page is worse than no page. It tells a visitor the site is abandoned, and it gives search engines a thin page to index, which does your search visibility no favors at all.
Our piece on uncluttered design makes the same argument about layout. The principle carries to structure.
What comes next for navigation
Two things follow directly from this screen. You can now drag your menu into the order you want, and later you will be able to group pages under a heading for a two-level menu, which is what larger sites eventually need.
Start with the order
Open your pages list and read the menu top to bottom. The first item after Home should be whatever you most want a casting director to click. For most actors that is the reel, not the biography. If your menu says otherwise, move it. If you are starting from nothing, create your free actor website and the standard set is already laid out sensibly.
Reading about actor websites, or building one?
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