Graham Weldon

Serious Branding

Sunday, 10 January 2010
Tagged: Website, General

While I am far from an expert in this area, I have come to realise over the last couple of years how important it is to identify yourself as an important individual in the online community, and brand yourself appropriately.

I've been working on a whole range of changes to my personal site design, and it comes back to refreshing, but not overly changing the site style too much. Visitors come to expect a certain content and design from your site, and changing too much over a short period of time can be detrimental.

This stems somewhat from my history as a Gaming Administrator for an online gaming network. Changes to the settings and servers that were established for a longer period of time were more popular. Players knew what to expect and how to work with that server and its settings. Its similar for the visiting user to your website.

My personal website retained its boring old grey/blue look for many years before being significantly changed to its current dark purple design. This design was sparked from the initial teaser page designed, which was minimal and simple, while I transitioned and finalised a new design.

Get to the point! Right, so the point is I have a presence in a number of locations across the net. My Twitter page has recently been updated to make the overall branding of my social presence standardised, and its now a matter of bleeding that through to wherever I can. My Gravatar will be next, along with my Twitter Avatar.

Branding yourself is an important process to gain and sustain a following if you're trying to say anything to a public online community. Take yourself seriously, get a design that reflects you and what you are talking about.

I promise this blog post had a purpose when I started it...