Market Yourself: Take Control of Your Online Presence

Online presence is everything now a days. Companies are checking future and current employee's Facebook and they are judging you off of your tweets you post on Twitter. We live in a generation where you can type someones name into a search bar find out whatever you want about someone. It is very important to pay attention to what type of message you are putting something online publicly or privately.

My first step to making my online presence better was creating my own website: www.mikealder.com.
It took me a little over 24 hours to build it from the ground up. I'll take you through my website and tell you why I made the website the way I did.

Homepage

The first part of building my website was making the homepage. The homepage is VERY important because it sets up the consistency for the whole website. Even though I want each page of my website to focus on being unique they still need to be consistent. The consistency needs to be with font, colors, and the layout of your website.

I set up my homepage to be simple, eye catching, making your curious and wanting more. Since it is simple you can easily navigate around the website. Every icon is clickable on the homepage and is linked to another part of my website. The colors I chose were white (clean), black (professional), and darker neon green (creativity and energy).  When you get to the page the first thing that catches your eye is the picture slideshow, I did this because I want those who stumble upon my page to want to see more. The pictures themselves had to be clean, eye catching, but yet simple.

Pages

I then decided to start my page with four base pages: About Mike, Why Mike, Blog, and Connect. Each page is consistent to the homepage but has its own unique purpose.

I needed to have an "About Me" page but I didn't want to make it just a photo with a paragraph or two about me. We are in the now generation and people don't want to read a paragraph or two when you can show them. This is why I decided to put a video, from my Vimeo profile, explaining a little bit more about myself. The video had to be consistent with the website as well. If the video didn't look clean, professional, and show my creativity and energy.

I wanted a page that explained to future companies or people I may work for why you would want me to work with you. No matter how awesome my website looked I wanted to let them know what qualities I would bring to the table. I have many good qualities but since I wanted to make it simple I created a graphic surrounding my brand that gave my audience a one word explanation of what I am about. Then they have the option of read to the side of the graphic more details about me. At the bottom of the paragraph there is a link back to the About Mike page.


I needed to figure out a way for my audience to come back and also make me a credible resource. If i'm not credible then my website has lost its purpose. In order to create credibility and keep my audience coming back I created this blog. Now my blog isn't full integrated into my website, yet. Even though my blog isn't integrated with my website I still have to keep the consistency. You'll find this consistency with each of my online profiles. Blogs are not the only way you can create credibility and keep your audience coming back.

What a better way to show you my consistency, credibility, and keep you coming back for more than to connect you with all my social media and online profiles. I made sure to link to all my social media profiles and have them link back to mikealder.com. This is because someone might not find me on my personal website but instead on twitter or linkedin. I wanted to make my personal website my flagship website.

Check out my website: www.mikealder.com and let me know what you think of it!