Short answer: NO. This question comes up quite a bit in the voice over community, and having a demo or two on the landing screen is definitely an option when you have a site designed by us, but there is no right or wrong answer to this question. Many of our sites have the landing screen focus just on the branding, and that’s perfectly okay too. In fact, we find that a stylish brand with clear direction on what to do and where to go, gets more response for your business.

One thought is that people looking to hire voice talent are very busy and do not have time to look through a website to find the actor’s audio demos. While it’s true that there are sites out there that may be older and not well organized, and perhaps the demos are hard to locate, and that could hurt the chances of being hired. However, we don’t believe that demos absolutely must be on the landing screen either. As long as there is either a “Demos” tab in the navigation or even a “Listen now” button on the home page, we believe that people are web savvy enough to locate the talent’s demos easily. Everybody is very accustomed to using websites and we make sure that the audio demos are extremely easy to find on any website that we design.

That being said, we come at each website from a creative and custom brand angle, and we use the landing page for expressing our client’s image and style. There is not much room for that if we are trying to cram everything in one landing screen, especially on mobile devices. We prefer a minimal and clean look and feel that’s less overwhelming for visitors to your site as well. We do occasionally add one or two small players, or a call to action button on a client’s landing screen if they request it, but in most cases, the demos are a quick scroll down or one easy click to another page. We’ve never had anyone say that people can’t find their demos, but we do hear that they get a lot of compliments on their design and brand!