SSL security via HTTPS
I recently came across a tweet by a casting director, I wish I had saved it for reference, but I did not. In short what it started off as was an actress (luckily not one of ours) advertising herself on Twitter who posted a link to her website. The problem is... she posted the link starting with "https://" instead of "http://" and her website did not have an SSL certificate available. When this happens, you get a big warning from your browser that pretty much says "Woah, this page is not secure, you better run away right now". And that's what people were doing. On top of that, they replied to her tweet saying that her website has "viruses".
This was no business of mine, but I saw the keywords "actor" and "website" in a tweet, so I jumped in and tried to explain to these people that it doesn't really mean anything bad, she just mistyped the link, it should start with "http://" at which point one of the casting directors chimed in something along the lines:
"I can now see the website, but there is still text next to the domain name that says Not secure. Whenever I see that I quickly close the website."
I was totally surprised, because I figured everybody knew that this notification doesn't mean anything on an actor website. After all, there are no login information being passed through it, nor does it ask you for your social security number - it's fine. In fact, I was considering adding this security to all of the actor websites on Web For Actors just for the sake of search engine optimization, because the rumor is that Google will rank you higher if your website is secure, but THIS, well, this did it.
Now, there's nothing wrong with your website being just on http:// BUT, if there are other people out there who do not understand that, you have two options: Either teach every single person about how harmless your website is OR just suck it up and secure your website with a certificate.
If you have your website elsewhere, you can either invest in annual certificates from your host, or create your own 3 month certificate for free, but don't forget to renew them every year or every 3 months depending on how long they last.
If you're with Web For Actors however, we got you covered. Starting this month, all of our customer domains will automatically redirect to the secure protocol. There is nothing you have to do. If your business card still says "http://" on it - no problem, even if someone types it in as such, it will still work. For instance, my domain name on Web For Actors is "TomAshem.com" and no matter what I type into the browser, our code will correct it and redirect you to the proper full path:
All of the above will redirect to https://www.tomashem.com - to put your visitors at ease and to give you those bonus points with the search engines.
