Beauty is in the Detail
This is not yet another blog post of us VS them, even thought it may read as one. I've decided to point out small things that you may not have noticed with your premium (or even free) accounts on Web For Actors, but it's those little details that show that we care about making sure your online presence is well handled. And since the photo for this article is my own Twitter Card, let's talk about those first:
- Twitter Cards for Actor Websites
What is a Twitter Card? Have you ever shared any website on Twitter? Underneath your post, Twitter will attach a card that says what your website is with a little preview. For most people ho haven't set up this featured, you will get a broken looking text with perhaps a cutoff image, here are some examples:
||EXAMPLE1||
But if you are a premium member, your cards will be displayed in style, just like mine is:
||EXAMPLE2||
Want to see how your websites would look like? Just click on this link, and enter your website. Is it pretty like mine, or malformed like the examples above? Let us know in the comments.
2. Favicons for Actor Websites
Another smaller (in size) detail are the favicons generated from your website. Have you ever bookmarked something in your browser and then either the title is malformed or the image is just a gray globe, like 30 other bookmarks you have now? Sucks, right? Well, for our members, we create a custom icon made out of your initials, so for me, I get a nice little TM in white on an orange background every time I bookmark my page. How does it work for you if you're not a Web For Actors member? Are you getting a logo of the hosting company? Or perhaps that gray globe again?
3. Actor Specific Touches
Have you ever tried to print a website? It usually looks really weird, right? But have you ever tried to print a Web For Actors member website? We are creating a custom view card for each print page, but that's only if you do not have a resume attached. If you have a resume, we send people to print your resume instead. That makes way more sense for Actors than anyone else, we get it, but Actor Websites is what we do. If we were doing e-commerce boutiques we'd probably not have that feature.
4. Mobile Theme Color
Still another small example, and only people with Android phones will be able to see it, but if you load your website on a (non-iPhone) phone, you'll see that the browser design adapts its colors from the colors you picked out from your website. Cool, right? I guess we haven't seen that anywhere else, so we thought we'd share it with you in case you missed it. Or maybe your website does it too? Show us your examples in comments.
5. Accessing Your Control Panel
And for those who do not want to try to remember the name of our company, or look for bookmarks to access your actor's control panel, maybe you didn't know that if you go to your website, i.e. actressjane.com and you click "ESC" key, you will be taken to control panel login page? It's just a neat little shortcut, and yet another feature we've added to all of our members to show them we care.
6. S.E.O. robot.txt Files and Sitemaps
And let me talk geek for a quick second. Unless you've hired an S.E.O person to handle your code, if you are not a Web For Actors member, your information is not being sent out to search engines when your website is updated. Well, we do take care of that for you as well. robots.txt file is located on your domain name like: actressjane.com/robots.txt and it links robots such as Google to your custom sitemap where your pages are listed with the date of last update. I'm not even going to ask for examples if you're not a member. The chances are that Google may not even know your website exists.
Do you have any other ideas that you would want us to implement? Let us know in the comments below.
