Your Menu Is the Pages in Your Account, in the Order You Set

The navigation on your website is built from the pages in your account. Add a page and it appears. Rename it and the label changes. Reorder it and the menu follows. There is no separate menu to maintain alongside the pages, which is the whole point.

Ordering it

Drag any item up or down and the change is live immediately, on desktop and on mobile. Reordering your menu covers the mechanics.

Order matters more than most people expect. A visitor reads the first two items and skims the rest, so whatever you most want seen should not be fourth. For most actors that is the reel and the credits, which argues for putting them ahead of the bio however tempting it is to lead with the story.

Adding and naming a page happens on the same screen as placing it, which is covered in pages and menu in one place.

Two things the menu can do beyond your own pages

An item can point at another website entirely: a booking page, a casting profile, a production's own site, a shop you run elsewhere. That is external links in your menu, and it is how you keep one front door while your work is spread across several places.

Items can also nest. Group several pages under a heading and the menu gains a second level, which is what keeps a site with fourteen pages navigable instead of overwhelming. That is two-level menus, and the honest advice is to reach for it later rather than sooner. A flat menu of five items beats a nested one of fourteen for most actors.

Click every item, including the ones you never use

This is a five-minute job worth doing after any significant change to your site.

The reason is that you are the worst person to notice a menu problem. You know where everything is, so you navigate by habit and only ever click three of the items. A visitor clicks the ones you do not, because they are looking for something specific and have no idea which page it is on.

Open your site in a private window, work along the menu left to right, and open every single one. Anything nested, open that too.

Related: how a design reads your account and your own words on every design. Browse the catalog or create a free actor website.


Tomasz Mieczkowski

About Tomasz Mieczkowski

Tomasz Mieczkowski is the co-founder of IADB.com and all of the related websites for film and tv industry professionals.

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