Well, I assume so, I haven’t really started.
However, I’ve spent the last 4 days consumed by my new grantnorwood.com site. I’m all over the place for sure – spending my time across developing my core vision, planning features, designing the look n’ feel, writing code, configuring servers, creating my initial social presence, and of course somewhere between the gaps I’ve begun to work on the content for all this web-based real estate I’ve obtained. Nobody is gonna follow me if the content isn’t at least mostly appealing to my audience on occasion, right?
Oh yeah, note to self, decide who my audience is going to be. That probably should be closer to the top on my list …
But I’ve now gotten a better idea of the commitment I’m making and the direction I want to take things. I won’t saturate people with my most random thoughts, that’s personal facebook kinda stuff (and there’s plenty of that). My plan is to maintain grantnorwood.com as my root professional presence within the intertubes we love so much, so that nobody has to wade through dumb stuff to find the good stuff. Sound like a plan?
Here’s what I’ve done so far:
- Repurposed grantnorwood.com as a blog site running the latest WordPress content engine and a custom theme. I used to host client demos and such here.
- Created a custom color scheme using a “tetrad (double contrast)” model for my new site at http://colorschemedesigner.com/. I’m still learning about color, which sounds funny, but I’m not a trained graphic artist and really have to try hard to keep learning!
- Created a new facebook page for my SXSW voting campaign. You should definitely go “like” my page on QR codes, it is the topic I’m promoting for my panel at the 2011 SXSW Interactive Festival.
- Added an AddThis widget to my blog allowing visitors to quickly share the pages they find interested via almost any social networking application, like facebook, twitter, google, myspace, digg … well you get the idea. It’s always on the right side of every page, so use it!
- Enabled XML SiteMap protocols and such, and designed a process where I can automatically publish new and updated content to Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, and Bing for better search results and more search-generated traffic.
- Enabled Google Analytics for tracking the pages on my site, which allow me to see what content is the most popular, and what I need to focus on to ensure only the highest quality content that is of interest to people makes it onto my site.
- Ran the Yahoo! YSlow tool against my pages to be sure performance is satisfactory.
- Formatted links and URLs so they are more easily shared on facebook with nice thumbnails and appropriate excerpts.
- A whole lotta technical stuff I won’t bore you with …
- Wrote this post on what I’ve done.
Please stay tuned, more quality programming is coming your way!