Saturday 4 June 2011

Have You Tried About.me? A Cool Profile Splash Page

There are lots of online profile/business card thingys around, but I came across About.me recently and was enthused enough to give it a whirl. Here is mine that I whipped up very quickly.

Most of us have bits of our lives scattered across the web in various pockets and this is a great way to collate all of these together and personalise them in your own splash page. Get in quick and you may be able to claim your own vanity url as well (bonus!).

You can add in a bio of up to 2,500 characters, plus a heading and your name.


Customising the background is simple with your own high res photo, or use one of the templated ones.

Adding in links to your profles scattered across the web is easy, and About.me supports most of the popular ones (eg Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and the main blog sites), and you can add other websites or RSS feeds if they are not listed.

I liked that your profiles can be previewed from about.me without having to leave the site to go to LinkedIn etc. And viewers of your Twitter profile can follow you from About.me - easy.

One of the limitations was that you can't control the positioning of the background photo (centred or tiled) or the size and shape of the text box (although you can move it around the page). Fonts and colours can be selected to match your other web profiles. 

For those of you who are analytical like me, you'll love the statistics page showing you how many people have visited your splash page,  and which profiles they clicked and viewed. Here is a sample analytics page to give you a feel of what it looks like once you have collated a bit of data. Love it.
A quick scan of the feedback forum shows the top requested enhancements are: support for personal URLs or domain names, excluding own browsing from the stats page, allowing Google Analytics to be embedded and options to add icons for non supported services. Each user has 10 votes to use on the feedback forums allowing you to cast votes for your most wanted changes. About.me shows the status of each request (eg Started, Under Review, Planned) - great visibility and transparency of how the community can drive changes.

There are plenty of cool and inspirational splash pages using About.me in their directory - take a look or here are a few featured at present.


So in summary, this is a free, easy to use, customisable splash page which you can use for your professional or personal profile. Great for bloggers or people who have lots of profiles around the web. Give it a whirl!
                               


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