Jenteal(TM) (yes, she's a registered trademark!) is a hands-on kind of gal. Almost immediately after she started performing in adult video in 1995 (at age "eighteen years, three months") she founded her own fan club. She wrote and designed her mailings, carted them to the post office, did her own shipping. Two years later, she became one of the first adult stars to go live on the Internet with a membership site and e-commerce shop.
And now Jenteal(TM) is bringing new meaning to the title "Webmistress," designing, hosting and maintaining sites for her Vivid Girl-friends, Dyanna Lauren, Haven, and Kobe Tai under the umbrella of www.adultstarnetwork.com, which she operates with her husband and partner, Chris Dakota.
When Jenteal(TM) set out to build her "Secret Spot" in cyberspace, there were very few adult stars online, just a handful of sites that were obviously, uh, homemade; but there was also Asia Carrera, who learned HTML and had recently gone live with the impressive asiacarrera.com, which Carrera built herself from the ground up. It was becoming clearer and clearer that the Internet was going to be an important income source and a great way to connect with fans, but Jenteal(TM) - unlike Asia - was not particularly interested in learning code herself, nor was she inclined to work with any of the budding Web designers who approached her, wanting to develop a site. "I've always been pretty skeptical about going into business with people I don't know," she says.
Eventually, a commercial Web design firm, run by "a friend of a friend" convinced Jenteal(TM) to claim her piece of the Web. "They came in with a site design and a theme, and the idea of labeling me the 'California Girl,'" says Jenteal(TM). "They were so well-prepared, I figured I'd give it a shot. They'd never done an adult site before; they mostly did music-based sites for the music business. But they wanted to get into the adult industry and thought this would be a fun project."
The initial design took over a year to build, and cost somewhere between seven and ten thousand dollars. The site is database-driven, built in Cold Fusion. Jenteal(TM) had the designers create a private area where she could do updates herself. "They basically built it for an idiot to run," she says, laughing. "At the time, I knew nothing about the Web, and I wanted to have as much involvement as possible. I told them I didn't want to have to take HTML classes, so they built me a program where I didn't need access to the server and didn't need to know code. And now we build sites for our clients the same way, because adult stars don't usually know HTML; it's not something they really want to learn. But they do want to take a proactive position in the management of their Websites."
Using the private area on their own sites, Jenteal(TM)'s clients can update chats, revise online and live appearance calendars, add text to diary entries, change photos, and add or remove merchandise from online shopping pages. "The only thing they can't do is change the basic dynamic structure of the site. They can't add pages, but they can edit whatever is on the existing pages."
A year after "Jenteal(TM)'s Secret Spot," went live at www.jenteal.com, Jenteal(TM) and Chris took the site over for themselves. "We were very happy with it," Jenteal(TM) says, "but we wanted to expand, and the people we were working with got too busy to meet our demands." They bought their own servers and Chris took a class to learn Cold Fusion. It was only after they bought their servers (which are housed about three miles away from Jenteal(TM)'s Redondo Beach offices) that it occurred to them that they could build and host sites for other adult stars. "Actually, it was Chris' idea," Jenteal(TM) reveals.
"It all started when a couple of my girlfriends at Vivid were having trouble with the companies they had hired to run their fan clubs. They were concerned that they weren't getting all their money, and felt like they had no hand in what was going on with their own clubs. So they asked us to manage the clubs, which are basically run through direct mail. Once we were doing that, developing Websites for them seemed like a natural progression."
Jenteal(TM) took on the Webmistress crown gradually, first taking over her friends' clubs, creating their mailings, and warehousing and shipping their merchandise from her offices. The next step was creating e-commerce pages or "shoppes," hosted on adultstarnetwork.com's servers, through which each of the girls could sell their merchandise online. From there, the girls asked Jenteal(TM) and Chris to build them full member Websites, like "The Secret Spot."
The basic structure of all the adultstarnetwork.com sites is the same: A generous "free" area is open to anyone who logs on. This part of the site is liberally peppered with photos and text, designed to entertain and ultimately entice the visitor to become a member. The extensive "members only" areas, abundant with diaries, hot still photos and steaming streaming video, are certainly a step above what you can get for free.
Common to all the sites is the clear voice and personality of the individual star. Jenteal(TM), for example, is as funny, sexy and direct online as she is in person. Her home site in April offered a special feature: "Win My Vagina" (an adult toy, actually, but you don't know that 'til later). And on the FAQ page: "Can you send me a free picture?" "No," she replies, "but you can buy one from my Shoppe.... We're all in this business to make money!"
How she does it is hard to say, but Webmistress Jenteal(TM) still does it all: She continues to travel for live appearances, does the writing and the design for all four sites - and four fan clubs. Recently she's been developing her already considerable skills as a still photographer, and directing her own videos.
But has she learned HTML? "I can get by," Jenteal(TM) laughs. She confides that Chris does most of the HTML updates and all the Cold Fusion updates. "Cold Fusion! That's a language I don't even care to understand. Ever!"
And what comes next? "We want to continue to market the network, help the girls make money and, of course, continue to make a profit ourselves. We're friends. We work together in films; we trust each other. They know we'll take good care of them. That's really important in any business, but especially in this one."
