Wow!

You are looking at the brand new Ben Hauck online. Thank goodness!

You can’t know how much time I’ve spent trying to get this live. Here and there in December I dabbled in Wordpress until finally digging in closer to Christmastime. When away on Christmas break, much more of my time was spent on the computer tweaking code than with family, to figure out what I wanted in a new website and then trying to get it to happen. Although I can do some cool things, I’m still ultimately an amateur and things take me a long time. This website was an evolution to get to the point you see now, and right now I’m extremely happy with the result.

There are major improvements over the prior site (currently still online). First a little backstory: The prior site was hastily put together after creating an ambitious minimalist version of Ben Hauck online. When you logged onto that site, you saw a white screen with only 5 words on it. When you clicked on each word, a whole box of content associated with that section would suddenly open up. However, there were problems with that site. While I was very proud of what I accomplished, people tended not to understand the site or what I was going for. Plus, it took a whilte for the site to load. After hearing less than raving reviews, I decided I needed to scrap that site and get a new site up pronto. Not having a lot of time on my hands because of a busy acting career, I had a slight lull in acting gigs over a week to put up the subsequent site (the site prior to this one). It, too, was pretty much a failure in that some people didn’t seem to understand its organization. I was again, proud of what I accomplished with that design (notably, an animated scrolling feature that jettisoned a person down a page to different sections). But some people thought they were seeing just a flashing screen–duh. Plus, I couldn’t even make good use of the site: When I wanted to direct someone to specific content on my site, I had to give the main URL then tell them something like, “Click on Acting and go to Videos > Comic Improvised Sermons > Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.” Not very eloquent, esp. when a simple URL is what I wanted to give.

I held onto that site from late June-ish until October, when I was forced to make a decision. My old webhost, which was highly rated for years, was bought over the summer. In October they decided they would do an upgrade that would make the backend of my website inaccessible for a whole week. Despite a confident assertion that this would not negatively affect my site, it did exactly that. When I tried logging into my blog software to update my news, I found myself shut out of it. I couldn’t update my news blog. Tech support couldn’t help and were likely swamped in critical reactions to the changes customers were experiencing. I was basically up expletive’s creek.

So I did some research into a new host. I had heard about Wordpress and my webhost put the nail in the coffin when they were unwilling to make an update to the auto-install of Wordpress to the new version. So, after a lot of research (there is a lot of crazy fake reviews of web hosts out there), I settled on a new web host, one that was reviewed well, had what I wanted, and was in my price range. This host is exactly what I wanted and much more. Basically, I pay what looks like the same price but get ease of use, great tech support, great features, and opportunities to expand my website horizons.

In particular, I have the ability to easily create multiple Wordpress blogs. I created this website in Wordpress, and I manage almost all of it through Wordpress’s backend. But I also plan on making more blogs based on this platform. Soon up is a remake of my old marathon training blog, especially as I gear up for the NYC Marathon 2010 and the Boston Marathon 2011. I am also planning on creating a personal blog of my non-career life. Not to mention, I may move the minimalist site for PowerfulImprov.com over to Wordpress, and I have a great idea for an informational website just for film and television stand-ins. Those sites may not be as hard to create as this one was, so I may be able to have them online in, say, 3 months?

Because I couldn’t get into the backend of my old news blog (a decade’s worth of notes about auditions, acting gigs, etc.), I thought all was lost until I realized I have website-copying software and I simply copied the pages from that blog. I put them back online and posted a link to those old posts in the footer of this website under “OLD NEWS ARCHIVES.”

This site promises to be exciting and informational. There are some cool features. For one, I’ve made this site much more interactive: You can post your comments in many parts of the website. For two, I’ve made parts of the site “dynamic” in the sense that they update when I post to this blog. Another cool aspect is the connection this site has with my cell phone: Using my phone, I can photograph my acting life and put things online even when I’m not at a computer. There are a lot of possibilities when it comes to that, but one thing of note is that I can get those photos featured on the slideshow you probably saw when you first logged in. The content of that slideshow is tied to images that appear in posts, and will can be updated fairly easily and regularly.

You’ll want to explore the site as it’s also fun to click around. For past designs, it seemed that people liked animated sliders that revealed content, so I based a lot of my website on that approach to content. Because of these sliders, not only can I put a lot of information in a small space and keep the look of the website clean, but I can also hide content for it suddenly to show up when you click. Intentionally I haven’t made some aspects of the website clearly slideable. I leave it up for you to find!

Lastly, I got this done just in time. While I still have some content updates to make, getting to this post is an accomplishment. Tomorrow the acting gigs start back up. While I don’t know how busy my January will be, I hope it’s busy, and where it’s not, I’ll probably be getting the content up this site up to date. I have more videos and photos to add, some acting news to post retroactively since I’ve been silenced online since early October, and some evolution of this current site likely.

In the meantime, I would very much appreciate your feedback on this website if you have the time to review it a bit. I am interested mostly in the usability of the website: Can you find things easily? Can you read things you need to read? And are things displaying as you think I intended? These three questions are probably most important to me. However, I know I am a bit sensitive to harsh criticism this early, so if you have comments, please point out positives in addition to your negatives so I don’t get too desperate about this website. (You should have known my despair I experienced upon my last two failed versions of my website!) To send me website feedback, please send me an email via my Contact page.

In the meantime, make sure you sign up for my e-newsletter THE BEN HAUCK NEWS which is in the middle column (click and see!). I can also control that via a Wordpress plugin that looks promising and I hope to get another edition sometime in January.

By the way, I should give a special thanks to Matt Lambert. I was shopping around for free Wordpress themes to use for my website (what makes Wordpress REALLY cool). I didn’t really know what I wanted, and when I came across the theme Matt created, I was so inspired. It is called the Cardeo Minimal Wordpress Theme. So while I created this site, a lot of its overall structure is thanks to Matt.

In the next few days, you’ll probably see some posts dated before this post, likely the result of my doing news posts that I’ve stored in email since early October. Also, some aspects of the website will start to fill in (notably, the News Tag Cloud in the footer) as my career news picks up. But one thing to report about these past few months careerwise: I’ve had a wonderful and flattering fun as the stand-in for Peter Facinelli who plays Coop on the Showtime show Nurse Jackie. Even more joy about that gig was that it shot at the studio that is next door to my apartment, which meant a two-minute commute to work! This was a boon because I was training for a marathon for half of my time on the show, and the lack of travel time meant the opportunity to get out to Central Park to train. (By the way, I did the Philadelphia Marathon in 3:07:32, which qualified me for the Boston Marathon for the first time.)

Okay, that’s it for now! If you’re an RSS kind of person, there is a Subscribe button in the footer. But make sure you check out the website as it fills in over this first month back online.

Cheers!

Ben Hauck