Appropriately enough I saw this session advertised on twitter, as for some reason I missed it in the Film Victoria ebulletins.

Film Victoria’s Brad Giblin opened this information session at ACMI today by explaining that it was a follow up to a similar one held around a year ago. The Screen Business Online program is an attempt by Film Victoria to encourage and assist people to build their ongoing viability by ramping up their online presence, and engage with their audiences online. Up to $10,000  is available as a grant, and two of the three speakers in this session were past recipients.

So what did they do with their dough?

One key takeaway from the morning was the flood of people migrating onto the WordPress platform as a way of avoiding all that mind-boggling HTML code and enabling the owners of the business to update their content easily and constantly. WordPress is essentially a way of creating a blog, and it can be free, but it’s also a way of creating a web site that will look fine on the major browsers, including the horrible Internet Explorer. So you can slap content into your site without shoving the borders sideways or ending up with a blank screen. You can go a long way with WordPress, assisted if you wish by designers and techheads who know more about CSS than you ever wanted to.

And that was well demonstrated in the presentations by Sue Maslin and Robert Connolly, who both demonstrated gorgeous sites full of content.

Sue Maslin even quoted sales figures that proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can make cold, hard moolah from online sales of your back catalogue – surely a thought that will bring smiles to every filmmaker’s screen. And useful wads of cash, not biscuit money.

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