Building Your Personal Website
Putting your “personal brand” online is important for everyone, professionals and students, whether you’re a technology person, an artist or a liberal arts major.
Scary (or Inspiring) Stats
- 56% of all hiring managers are more impressed by a candidate’s personal website than any other personal branding tool
- Only 7% of job seekers actually have a personal website.
(from workfolio.com)
Here’s a list of resources for building personal websites.
- How My Personal Website Helped Me Land My Dream Job – Why you should create a personal website. (themuse.com)
- Why Every Job Seeker Should Have a Personal Website, And What It Should Include – Just what the title says. (forbes.com)
- You Are Missing Out By Not Creating A Personal Website: Disproving The 6 Myths – Why you should create a personal website. (makeuseof.com)
- Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building Your Personal Website in a Week – A guide to planning your personal website before you start building. (themuse.com)
- The Ultimate Guide To Building A Personal Website (video summary) – After you read number 1, 2 and 3 and then do number 4, use this step by step tutorial to build a personal website (using WordPress.) This post includes some good pesonal website examples and some suggested themes, plugins and widgets. There is a long section on buying a web hosting using the author’s Hostgator account (and the same in the video.) Skip it. (College Info Geek)
- 6 ways to make your personal website more effective – Some good tips.
- The 35 Best Personal Websites We’ve Ever Seen – Great inspiration for your personal website. (themuse.com)
“Presentations” Video Playlist
This is a YouTube playlist I created about Presentations. The playlist opens with an explainer about great presentations by Wienot Films, features three clips with Garr Reynolds (author, Presentation Zen) and Nancy Duarte (author, Slide:ology,) arguably the godfather and godmother of modern preso decks (and they seem like such nice people too!), tosses in a TED talk with Garr Reynolds (again), and then wraps with Scott Berkun demoing an Ignite talk at Ignite Seattle.
Here’s the running order:
- How to Give an Awesome (PowerPoint) Presentation (Whiteboard Animation Explainer Video).
- Video Q&As with Zen-master Garr Reynolds (part 1 of 3)
- Video Q&As with Zen-master Garr Reynolds (part 2 of 3)
- Video Q&As with Zen-master Garr Reynolds (part 3 of 3)
- Story, Imagery, & the Art of 21st Century Presentation: Garr Reynolds at TEDxKyoto 2012
- How and Why to Give an Ignite Talk – Scott Berkun
Enjoy!
Mini Audio Production Textbooks
Download these guides if you want or need to understand and learn audio production.
I have used Shure mixers and mics my entire professional life and have never been disappointed. They are one of the few companies that think educating their customer with really useful information is important.
Freelance Pros and Cons
The Onion serves up this list of helpful Pros and Cons of Freelance Employment. Take heed!
Found a Cool WordPress Plugin!
I have a set of what I call “standard” plugins that I install on WordPress sites. I used to upload the plugin files via FTP. A lot of files. Then WordPress allowed me to mark plugins as favorites in the Plugin Repository and then select Favorites when adding a new plugin. Good but tedious; You could only install one plugin at a time. Then I found wpfavs.com.
Wp Favs lets you create lists of your favorite plugins and then using the Wp Favs plugin you can download an entire set. I set up an account on wpfavs.com and then created a set of my standard plugins by entering keywords in a search box; a pop-up list shows matches. I found it faster to copy and paste the full name of my favorite plugins from another WP install in the search box. Then just install and activate the Wp Favs plugin on the target site and your favorite plugins are waiting to be installed in an interface like the main WP Plugin screen.
You can see a list of my standard plugins here or look at the list at wpfavs.com here.