Beets. Bears. Brand Building!
Hello hello! Thanks for coming back and reading about my journey as I tackle productivity during a furlough. I hope my experience can help you navigate your own furlough, or provide helpful tips on how to build up your skills! In this blog post I will talk about creating a personal brand by building a website.
Mari’s Survival List:
1. Take a breath & grieve for what has happened – DONE
2. Pull yourself together & apply for unemployment when you qualify – DONE
3. Create a plan – DONE
4. Find some free educational tools & gain a professional skill– Working On It*
5. Create a brand for yourself by building a website
6. Update your resume & LinkedIn
7. Let people know what you have been up to
8. Celebrate!!
5. Create a brand for yourself by building a website
After talking with some friends, I realized that I should build a personal website, one that I have always wanted to create in order to showcase my current and past work. The only problem was the fact that I haven’t built a website from the ground up in over 8 years. To start, I chose a website builder I was semi-familiar with - Wix. I built a website through their free templates and hated it. So, I restarted using a different template. And guess what? I hated that one too. I was super frustrated with myself because I couldn’t execute my vision.
In my frustration, I looked around and realized that I knew an extremely talented website and content creator who could help me with my website! One of my best friends, Tatiana Gonzales, has over 7 years of experience and an impressive portfolio of work with a variety of brands and industries. I approached her with my idea and talked through some of my expectations of how I wanted the website to look and operate. She suggested looking through Pinterest to find examples of themes, layouts, and color schemes to understand my personal taste. I gave her 90% of the creative freedom to design the website, while I provided direction on the layout and wrote all of the copy. **
If you don’t have access to a website developer, do not worry, there are resources out there to help you navigate this new world of website building. As I was learning how to build the first website I stumbled upon this website which was super helpful in relearning the basics of Wix and a step by step guide on building layers to your website. YouTube is also a great alternative to figure out how to build a website, below please find some links that I personally found helpful:
- Wix Tutorial for Beginners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7R3ZywgdCZI
- Build a Wix Website in 10 Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4OzBOcjMEI
- 24 Easy Mistakes to Make Building a Wix Website: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLfmsoFfRCI
- Build A Responsive Website from Scratch (Coding): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ZyDCt8QLxE&feature=youtu.be
In the next post I will share some tips and tricks to elevate your resume and LinkedIn profile. Until then, stay safe, healthy, and productive!
Always,
Mari
*Update on #4 Build A Skill: I’m almost done the course! I have two more lessons to go and then I take the final quiz to determine if I actually learned something. 😊
**Note to self (and to you): Don’t be afraid to reach out to others for guidance and/or help in creating something that you don’t know how to do. Put that pride aside and extend that hand!