What Your Website Needs to Do

The mistake that produces useless film websites is starting with looks — picking a template because it's pretty — instead of starting with jobs. A website is a tool, and like any tool it should be designed around what it needs to do. Websites for filmmakers have a specific set of jobs, and once you're clear on them, every later decision (builder, template, design, pages) has a purpose to serve. Get this backwards — build something attractive with no clear function — and you end up with a site that looks fine and accomplishes nothing, which is worse than no site at all because it wasted your time. So before we touch any tools, let's nail down what your website is actually for. These jobs will be the yardstick you measure every design and content choice against for the rest of the course.

The jobs of a film website

What your site actually needs to accomplish:

• Inform. Tell visitors what your film is — the story, the trailer, who made it, and what stage it's at. The basic "what is this" that anyone arriving needs answered instantly.
• Convince. Make people want to watch it — convey the tone, the appeal, the reason to care. Your site should sell the film emotionally, not just describe it.
• Convert. Turn a visitor into something more — an email subscriber, a ticket buyer, a viewer, a follower. The single most valuable conversion is usually capturing an email.
• Serve press & industry. Give journalists, programmers, and buyers what they need — press kit, stills, contact, screener access — quickly and professionally.
• Point onward. Send people where you want them to go — where to watch, your social channels, your other work — acting as the hub that connects everything.
• Represent you. Establish credibility and professionalism, making you look legitimate to everyone who lands there. The site is a first impression as much as a resource.

Designing around jobs, not looks

The discipline this chapter is pushing is to let function drive form. Once you know your site's jobs, you have a clear test for every decision ahead: does this template, this layout, this page, this element help the site do its jobs? A gorgeous template that buries your trailer and hides your email signup is a worse choice than a plain one that puts them front and center, because the plain one does the jobs. This job-first thinking is what separates effective film websites from decorative ones. Let me highlight the jobs that filmmakers most often neglect, because those are where sites usually fail. First, convert — a huge number of film websites inform beautifully and then let every visitor leave without capturing anything, which wastes the site's most valuable function; your site should almost always be working to turn visitors into email subscribers (the owned audience we keep emphasizing), so an email capture should be a deliberate, prominent part of the design, not an afterthought. Second, convince — many sites describe the film flatly (a synopsis, some credits) without ever making anyone actually want to watch it; your site should convey the film's tone and appeal emotionally, treating visitors like potential audience to be won, not just informed. Third, serve press and industry — during a release, journalists, programmers, and buyers will come to your site needing specific things fast (press kit, stills, contact, sometimes a screener), and a site that makes those easy to find looks professional and gets you coverage, while one that hides them frustrates the exact people who can help your film. Not every site needs to weight every job equally — a filmmaker home base leans on "represent you" and "point onward," while a film's release page leans hard on "convince" and "convert" and "serve press." So think about which jobs matter most for your specific site and moment, and prioritize accordingly. But the meta-lesson holds across all of them: decide the jobs first, then build to serve them, and judge everything by whether it helps the site do its work. A film website's success isn't measured in how impressive it looks — it's measured in whether it informs, convinces, converts, serves, points, and represents effectively. Keep these jobs as your north star, and the rest of this course — planning, builders, design, pages, media, launch — becomes a series of decisions in service of them. Next, we turn these jobs into an actual plan for your site's structure.