Tampa Bay Arts & FloridasBeach.com
Who runs them: Tampa Bay & Company, formerly known as the Tampa Bay Convention & Visitors Bureau; and Visit St. Petersburg-Clearwater, formerly known as the St. Petersburg-Clearwater Convention & Visitors Bureau
Why you need them: As you might expect from sites geared toward newcomers and tourists, these are attractive one-stop shops for information about arts activities in the area. Tampa's site includes A-Z links to organizations and a searchable events calendar compiled by the Arts Council of Hillsborough County (see below). The St. Pete/Clearwater site is prettier, airier and just as comprehensive, but its navigation is a little less transparent.

Arts Council sites
Who runs them: The Arts Council of Hillsborough County and the Pinellas County Cultural Council, respectively
Why you need them: Whether you're an artist looking for a grant or an arts fan looking for something to do, these are essential sites. Both feature extensive events listings, with Hillsborough also offering a Multicultural Visitors Guide. Pinellas' site includes a tremendously useful resource for artists: a downloadable monthly ArtsInfo document with info on fellowship opportunities, artists' relief funds, seminars and lots more.

Tampa Bay Creative Network
Who runs it: Graphic designer and Web developer Justin Elza founded the site (formerly St. Pete Creative Network), and since moving it to the NING platform he's amassed close to 500 artists, designers, performers and other "creatives" as members
Why you need it: Many of the better-known names in the Tampa Bay art scene are here, among them the Vitales, Marina Williams and Best of the Bay-winning fashion designers Ivanka Ska and Amanda Stiles. Some groups (graphic designers) are bigger and more active than others (actors), but this is a good place to start making connections for jobs, ideas, events and collaborations

Creative Tampa Bay
Who runs it: Creative Tampa Bay is a nexus of local leaders who believe in Florida — Richard Florida, that is, the "creative economy" guru. The list of directors and advisors runs the gamut from non-profit administrators to marketing honchos to freelance writers. Current chair is former Media General HR exec Donna Manion; Justen Fox is web producer.
Why you need it: The site itself is kind of barebones, but there are a few good reasons to bookmark it. It's got a downloadable version of CTB's eye-opening 2006 study of the Tampa Bay cultural landscape, "Things Are Different Here"; you can sign up for The Buzz, which offers a calendar of "creative events" each week ranging from art openings to tech socials; and it's got advance info on "The Florida Boomer Lifestyle," a CTB conference coming up in May with CFO Alex Sink and lifestyle chronicler Gail Sheehy as keynote speakers.

Anything Arts
Why you need it: As Megan Voeller reported in Creative Loafing last fall, the rise of Ning has proven to be a boon for artists who want and need networking tools. Brand Tampa (see News) and TBCN (see above) are off and running, while Anything Arts is still in its early stages, at least in Tampa and St. Petersburg. But in Sarasota, this "source for local arts news" has hundreds of members and a lively mix of profiles, forums, photography and blogs, and seems to be filling a need both for individual artists and for arts institutions.

Arts Net, Tampa Bay
Who runs it: A quartet of local arts writers — Sally Bosco, Dale W. Johnston, Lisa Moody and Wendy Withers.
Why you need it: The arts community can always use intelligent observers, and that's what you get at Arts Net. Whether the bloggers are covering Verdi's Requiem or the Gulfport Art Walk, The Lieutenant of Inishmore or Noah's Arc, they write like they know what they're talking about without taking themselves too seriously, and their prose is comfortably readable. The technical side is lacking; if you're using Firefox, you have to zoom in to read the blog's excruciatingly minuscule font, and the dark, muddy background doesn't help much either. But Arts Net is a blog that local artists and audiences would do well to keep tabs on.

Theater websites
Why you need them: All the leading theater companies in Tampa Bay have websites, of course, but these three in particular are worth a visit for entertainment value as well as ticket info.
Hat Trick Theatre Productions lives up to its motto — "We take fun VERY seriously!" — with a good-naturedly low-tech feature called "Hat Trick Home Movies," in which company members perform deadpan slowmo classic comedy bits in black and white on an old-fashioned A/V screen, complete with scratches and slide projector sounds. Watch 'em all — they're seriously fun.
freeFall's site is clean, elegant and impressively polished-looking for a fledgling company, but that's been the story of freeFall since its debut (note the rave reviews from CL theater critic Mark Leib). The "Values" page, dedicated to exposition of the company's founding principles, may read a bit lofty, but it looks flat-out beautiful.
Jobsite is led by David Jenkins, arguably the most wired theater guy in Tampa Bay: He blogs! He Facebooks! He tweets! He e-mails! (When does he have time to direct?) Accordingly, Jobsite's, um, site is packed with extras, including a frequently updated blog; video and photo galleries; extensive archives; a section devoted to "web goodies": and a wide array of links (bookmarked via Delicious) to outside sites, from local bands to arty blogs to The Onion.

Museum/Gallery sites
Why you need them: Museums and galleries gotta have websites, of course. But not every such site is a cyber-destination in its own right. Here are two that offer lots of extras worth lingering over.
"Everything about ArtPool just oozes awesome," said a St. Pete Times blogger, and we can't argue with that. Style maven and occasional CL photographer Marina Williams came up with a great idea for pooling resources with artists — they rent wall space from her gallery and keep 100 percent of the sales — but it's the regular doses of party-going fabulousness that give the place its signature vibe. And Williams has been able to capture that exuberance on the site, through sunny colors and rotating shots of body art, trash fashion and Purple Polaroids.
Similarly, the Salvador Dalí Museum site stays true to its institutional spirit. A deeply educational site with lots of background on individual artwork, it also highlights the "surreal deals" in the museum gift shop with its namesake's trademark self-promotional flair. And you can't beat the live construction-cam trained on the museum's new-home-in-progress; the image is kind of fuzzy, but it's more surreal that way.