How to Organise Your Site as a Multi-Hyphenate
For the whole of my working life, I’ve experienced a couple seconds of paralysis every time someone asks me the innocuous question, ‘What do you do?’
Nowadays, I say I’m a film director, script supervisor and web designer—or film director and web designer for short—when I’m not having an imposter syndrome moment.
But God knows I can’t fit that description into the waaay too short occupation box on immigration cards!
A key goal of any personal website is creating a clear narrative on who you are as a filmmaker or theatre-maker.
… but reaching this goal isn’t always straightforward when you’re a creative / multi-hyphenate / slashie / whatever multiple hat-wearing label you identify with 🤠.
If you’re in the arts sector and need some advice on how to organise your personal site, this post is for you!
One of the very first steps in creating a website to market yourself is deciding what work you want to share on your site.
By extension, this also requires an answer to the question:
What roles do I want to be known for?
I.e. Your answer to someone asking, What do you do?
Here’s an exercise that you can do to help you organise your roles. I’ve devised a simple matrix: the Promote-Passion matrix.
How to organise your personal site with the Promote-Passion Matrix
From my experience, I believe that most professionals working in film/television and the performing arts can divide their roles between:
work you are passionate about, i.e. your true passion(s), and
work you’re not quite as passionate about, but may still find value in doing.
I’ve also heard this categorisation referred to as ‘unicorn work’ 🦄 versus ‘workhorse work’ 🐴.
We can likewise divide our work into:
roles that we want to promote or showcase—often with the intention to attract similar jobs, right, versus
roles that we would much rather bury in the past, like that student film you acted in years ago, or that first corporate video you made for your uncle…
Marry those two together and passion + promotion gives rise to 4 groups or boxes in a matrix:
The Promote-Passion Matrix
The 4 quadrants break down into boxes:
Love + want to promote = work you’re most passionate about and most want to be known for.
Like + want to promote = services that pay the bills; side hustles; your bread and butter. Again, roles that you want to be known for.
Love + don’t want to promote = past work that doesn’t reflect what you do these days, but is work that you’re still proud of, e.g. old side projects/passion projects. OR work that you do on occasion.
Don’t love + don’t want to promote = past jobs that either don’t reflect who you are now or you aren’t proud of.
✏️ YOUR TURN: With the Promote-Passion Matrix, have a bit of a think about all the hats that you wear, and note down which boxes they fit into.
Practical next steps for organising your website
Once you feel happy with how your roles fit into those 4 groups, these are my general tips for organising your website based on that insight.
Create a web page for each of the roles that you’ve grouped under quadrants 1, 2 and 3. A page per role.*
Your roles under quadrants 1 and 2, which you want to promote, go into your main/top navigation in the page header of your site. This gets people to visit the pages you want to promote. You can have up to 6 linked pages in your main navigation, including your About and Contact pages. Fewer than 6 is better! Any more and your site design risks looking busy and overwhelming.
Links to pages that relate to quadrant 3 go into your footer. These pages can act as a public ‘archive’. In this way, visitors who want to stick around longer and get to know you more, can find this content.
For quadrant 4 jobs, you can choose to not include them on your website. Or, if you’re updating your current website, you can privately archive these projects by changing their status to draft.
My other main piece of advice is to have an About page with a biography that explains how everything fits together. This is your space to communicate a clear narrative about you.
By ‘Clear’ I don’t mean simple or straight. As theatre and film practitioners, our professional and creative journeys are often winding and unique. And what we’ve done in the past, makes us who we are today as artists and technicians.
Which is why I think websites that only show recent work that you want to seek more of—and I see this a lot amongst portfolio sites—isn’t the only way to go.
Your personal site is yours. If you want your to house those side projects that you’re proud of, still—go for it! Having done the Promote Passion Matrix exercise, you’ll be able to prioritise your work.
And organise your website so it doesn’t confuse visitors.
*If you have many, many job titles, look for similarities where you can group work under a broader title. For example, if you’re an actor, cabaret artist and voice actor, you could use the title of performer.
An example
Say you’re an actor on screen and on stage, a playwright, theatre director, acting coach, stage manager and registered intimacy coordinator.
After reflecting on your passions and areas of work that you want your website to draw attention to, your matrix looks like this—
I’d then organise your website like so, and this is by no means the only way to do it.
Have pages with these titles in your main navigation:
‘For Casting’ — this page would group your acting and vocal work. It could have your resume, headshots, showreels, and audio clips for people to listen to as different sections on the page.
‘Intimacy Coordination’ — alternatively, Intimacy Coordinator.
‘Coach’ — alternatively, Coaching. But because Intimacy Coordinator is a rather lengthy title, I’m inclined to keep the other titles short where possible to fit better into the main navigation bar.
‘Plays; — alternatively, Writing. See my comment above.
These links will join your About and Contact pages, making 6 links in total. That’s our cap!
Now for your other roles. Have a page for ‘Directing’ among your footer navigation links. A News page is also a great marketing tool, and can be included in your footer too.
While you liked being a stage manager, you’ve moved away from doing that kind of work, so you decide not to have a page dedicated to it. But because stage managing fed into your early career and helped you meet many of your wonderful theatre community, you mention it in your About page biography.
In your long bio, you connect the dots, building a narrative around who you are and what you do. When mentioned, you add links to your different pages, including Directing.
Wrap-up
I hope that the Promote-Passion Matrix helps you, as a multi-hyphenate, overcome the struggle of organising your personal website clearly. Keep creating, and thank you for being here!
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