The Objective

• Discover and create a persona online that will help you to market yourself and interact with the community
• Demonstrate that you are a real person, not just a resume
• Show off a little :)

The Challenge

• Create something that is maintainable, extensible, and not a time suck
• Be original, be yourself, don't be corny
• Be professional
• Experience? What experience?

The Process

1. Determine goals
2. Choose format & emphasis
3. Find your voice
4. Go nuts!

1: Determine Goals

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

- Yogi Berra

• Figure out what you want out of your site
• Not "A job," but "What job?"
• Not "Kick ass," "But at what?" (1, 2, 3)
• Should you worry about turning people off?

It starts with a conversation, so talk to yourself.

• Ask and answer 3 questions:
  • What does the user want?
  • What does the user expect?
  • What do you want the user to want?
• Just because you are your own client, doesn't mean you know your own audience...

-or-

2: Format & Emphasis

• Will help you determine the form & function of your site
• Should follow directly from the answers to your earlier questions
• Into design? javascript? Reflect your interests.

Format: Pick your platform(s)

• Bio/Resume
• Blog
• Work/Portfolio
• Social Media Aggregators

Format: Blogs

• Wordpress

• Wordpress

  • Low learning curve
  • Flexible, powerful, lots of themes to start from
  • Great community & plugins
  • Free!
  • http://wordpress.org
• ExpressionEngine

• ExpressionEngine

  • Very powerful
  • Tons of options out of the box
  • Simple templating language; no touching of PHP necessary
  • 'Core' version is free
  • http://expressionengine.com
• Tumblr & Chyrp

• Tumblr & Chyrp

  • Tumblelogs - Short-form, multimedia-oriented posts
  • Hosted/Roll your own
  • From super easy to a little involved
  • Can cross-post
  • No comments :(
  • http://tumblr.com & http://chyrp.net
• Posterous

• Posterous

  • Incredibly simple, tumblelog format
  • Post from email
  • Can cross-post
  • Has comments, but no comment feed
  • http://posterous.com
• Blogger, VOX, TypePad

• Blogger, VOX, TypePad

  • Up and running in minutes
  • Not much flexibility
  • Page has ads or toolbar (except TypePad)
  • TypePad costs $$
  • http://blogger.com, http://vox.com & http://typepad.com

Format: Work/portfolio

• Carbonmade
• 

  • Clean, hosted portfolio solution
  • 5 Projects, 35 images for free
  • No RSS
  • Have to use yourname.carbonmade.com
• Flickr
• 

  • Share with the community
  • Comments from others == selling point
  • Tons of feed options
  • Free for limited upload bandwidth
• Vimeo
• 

  • Cleanest free video embed
  • Great for demo reels or animation
  • Supports true HD
  • 500MB per month w/ free account
• Notes on uncommissioned work
• 

  • Intern for free, people love free
  • Just pick something and redesign it
  • Bigger is better

Format: Social media aggregators

• Widgets & badges
  • Available from flickr, twitter, vimeo, facebook, etc.
  • Gives you a code snippet to paste into your site
  • Works just about anywhere you have access to your html
  • Have to play by their rules as far as styling, usually pretty ugly...
• RSS
  • Much more flexible, you decide what to do with your data
  • Needs to be "parsed"
  • Use MagpieRSS if you have PHP

Emphasis

• Back to your goals...
• Designers
• Front-end developers
• Engineers

3: Find your voice

• Be yourself
• Finding inspiration
• What do you have to offer that's unique & interesting?
• Teach others, you don't have to be an expert

4: Go nuts!

• Sketches/wireframes
• Comping
• Coding
• Hosting

Sketches/wireframes

Comping

Coding

• Don't re-invent the wheel
• Blueprint/960gs
• 
• jQuery

• Write less, Do more

  Cross-browser dropdowns in 4 lines with jQuery:

  
  $('#nav li').hover(
      function(){ $(this).addClass('hover'); },
      function(){ $(this).removeClass('hover'); }
  );
  

• Wufoo
• 
• CSSEdit

Hosting

• You *really* do get what you pay for, but pretty good only costs $7-10/mo.
• A good control panel is half the battle
  • This is how you add new sites, install a cms, manage email, etc.
  • SiteAdmin is awesome
  • Plesk is not
  • One-click installs: blogs/CMS/forums
• Hosts we like:
  • Dreamhost (SiteAdmin?)
  • Site5 (SiteAdmin)
  • MediaTemple (uses plesk)
  • 1&1 (plesk-like)
  • Slicehost (advanced)