Cleaner, Faster, and Better on a Phone
The video pages on every design have been rebuilt. Same videos, new layout: a large primary player, a clean list of everything else, and a page that no longer takes four seconds to appear on a phone.
The old layout's problem
It treated every video as equal, in a grid. That is right for a photo gallery and wrong for a reel. Actors do not have twelve videos of equal importance. They have one reel that matters and a set of clips that support it, and the layout should say so.
It was also heavy. Every embedded player on the page loaded its own scripts whether or not anybody pressed play, which on a page with eight clips meant eight sets of third-party code before the first frame appeared.
What is new
- One featured video at the top, large, which you choose. See putting your reel front and center.
- Everything else in a list underneath, with titles and durations.
- Players load on demand. Nothing loads until somebody clicks. The page shows a still image until then, so it appears instantly.
- Vertical video is supported properly, rather than being letterboxed into a wide box with black bars either side.
- Titles and descriptions are shown, so a clip can carry context: the production, the role, the year.
Label your clips
"Untitled" and "reel_final_v3" are what most video pages actually contain, because the filename came along for the ride. Take five minutes and name them as a viewer would want them named: the production, the character, the type of work.
This matters for more than tidiness. Clip titles are text on the page, which means they are text a search engine can read. A page that says the names of the productions you have been in is a page that can be found by somebody searching for them, which is one of the few genuinely easy SEO wins available to an actor. More in SEO for actor websites.
How many clips
One reel and three to five clips. Past that, additions dilute. If a clip is not as strong as the reel, it is competing with the reel rather than supporting it. Our guides to building a showreel and creating a standout acting reel are the right reads before you decide what stays.
Where your video is hosted
Unchanged. YouTube and Vimeo links both work, and the new layout is agnostic about which. If you are weighing them up, our older piece on video content for actors covers the trade-offs.
No reel page yet? Create a free actor website and add your reel as the first thing you do.
