Film Festival Plan A: Your Website

Today's post brought to you by Jon Reiss:

I thought I'd offer a few more comments about having a filmmaker website. In fact it is crazy not to have a website during production or pre production these days as a way to start building your audience.

The king of using the web is Lance Weiller - definitely check out his Filmmaker Magazine article "Lessons in DIY" from Winter 2007.

But one quick tip - you don't need to spend a lot of money designing a complex static website with lots of information about your film. I recommend using a blog as your main page. It is much easier to set up and is easier to keep current and dynamic. For Bomb It nearly all the traffic is to our blog - very rarely do people check out the other static pages on the site. With a blog format - most likely using Wordpress - you can create all the information pages you need such as "About the Film" "About the Filmmakers" and have these in a box on the right or left. (we have Press and Screenings links at the top of ours)

I am slowly turning www.jonreiss.com/blog which is what you are reading into a main page for my site. It is much easier to update all of your information using "pages" in a blog than to have a web-designer have to rewrite your information using html.

Feel free to check out the difference in:

www.bombit-themovie.com

www.bombit-themovie.com/blog

Another good example of a blog as main page, and a site you should check out anyway is www.lanceweiler.com

- Jon Reiss