The General Tab Is Reorganized Around What Actors Actually Fill In First
Your profile is the source of almost everything on your actor website. It fills your bio page, your header, your contact details, your email signature and your press kit. It had also become a wall of fields in no particular order. That is now fixed.
The order matters more than the fields
We did not remove much. We reordered it, and grouped it, so that the screen reads top to bottom in the same sequence an actor would introduce themselves.
- Identity. Name, the name you work under if it differs, and your headshot.
- Basics. Location, the markets you are local to, height, playing age range.
- Industry. Union status, agency, manager, and the contacts that go with them.
- Words. Your short bio and your longer bio, side by side rather than on separate screens.
- Links. Social profiles, IMDb, casting site profiles.
Nothing is required beyond a name. A half-filled profile produces a perfectly respectable site. The point of the grouping is that you can see what you have skipped instead of scrolling past it.
Two bios, on purpose
The short bio is a sentence or two. It appears under your name, in your email signature, and in preview cards when somebody shares your site. The long bio is the one on your bio page. Writing both is a small chore and it is worth doing properly. Our guide to writing a professional bio covers the difference in detail, and the branding statement piece is a good companion if you find the short one harder.
Representation is now unambiguous
The old form had one contact block and a lot of guesswork about whose email was in it. There are now distinct places for your agent, your manager and yourself, each with a switch for whether it appears publicly.
This is a genuine practical improvement, not a cosmetic one. Plenty of actors want an agent's email on the public page and their own on the back end so that our own notifications reach them. That was not previously expressible. It is now. See our note on contact details in one place for how that flows through to every other page.
Everything downstream updates itself
Change your name once and it changes in your header, on every page that shows it, and in anything we later build on top of the profile. Change your headshot once and every design that shows one picks it up. That was already true internally. What is new is that the profile screen now tells you it is true, so you know where to make the change.
A short exercise
Open your profile and read it as a stranger. Does the short bio say what you do and what you are for? Is the headshot the one that looks like you today rather than the one you like best? Is there an email in there that you will still be checking in a year?
If the answer to any of those is no, that is twenty minutes well spent. Everything else on an actor website is built on top of this screen. If you do not have one yet, you can set one up free and fill this in first.
