There are countless platforms out there that you can use
to build your own free personal website, but not all of them will deliver the
same sense of quality and professionalism. If you’re looking for something fast
and simple that you just need to represent a landing page for yourself,
About.me could be one of your best alternatives to choose from.
What Is About.me?
About.me is a simple personal website platform that lets
you create a simple page to point users to your content and social media links.
For the sake of sticking to simplicity, About.me sites generally include a
background photo, an optional thumbnail profile photo, a description and some
links to social media or other websites.
About.me gives you one, single page to display all your
links and a summary of yourself, making it an ideal tool to get straight to the
point about who you are and what you do.
Why You Should
Have an About.me Page?
Your About.me acts as a virtual online business card. Put
the URL to your site in your Twitter profile, share it on Facebook, include it
on your resume or add it as your website on LinkedIn.
If you are a business owner or professional of some sort
who doesn't have a website, you can point colleagues, clients and prospects to
your About.me page so they can find out more about you and connect with you in
all the right places.
About.me is also great for getting discovered within the
network itself. You can randomly browse other About.me profiles and connect
with those users if you want by starring their profiles, email them or even by
leaving a compliment -- thus making it a good potential medium for expanding
your network.
Getting Started
Once you create an account (using your e-mail address,
password, and picking an About.me URL), future sign-ins can be regularly done
via Facebook or Twitter.
The About.me interface takes all the pain out of creating
a site; you can easily upload a background image, enter your name, a
"headline," and bio, and add links to just about any
social/sharing/blogging service in the world, including Facebook profiles,
Facebook Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Google+, Wordpress, TypePad,
Foursquare, Flicker, YouTube, Vimedo, Instagram, and others. All these links
and data go in a text box that you can then position where you want on the
background, relative to the most important part of the image. As you resize the
browser window the background will smartly resize as much as it can to maintain
your layout.
The Dashboard
About.me also includes a dashboard so you can find out
how many people are looking at your page and where they’re clicking through to.
If they click on your Facebook page or Tumblr, you’ll know. It’s kind of cool,
but it’s really just an alternative to Google Analytics that works pretty well.
The dashboard makes it really easy to see how popular
your page is. It’s also a little similar to LinkedIn. If another about.me user
visits your page while they’re logged in, you’ll get a notification for that. You
are able to turn notification off, if you wish.
Going Mobile
An About.me page looks good on a smartphone, where the page is reformatted to have the background graphic at the top and the text box info underneath. You can sign in and access features like stats while mobile, but can't edit the page. About.me has released an iPhone app that will let you change some of the text info (your headline and bio) but not all. The app allows you to set a background image for mobile-only views.
There's an option to activate an About.me email address
for yourself, which is a nice feature if you want to keep your real email off
the landing page to prevent spam. The service also excels at providing
suggestions to get more visitors to your landing page, with suggestions on
sharing the URL via social networks, links in other sites, and it has a form
for submitting the URL (any URL, actually) to Bing and Google.
Extras
Unusually there's no paid version of About.me, but it will sell you a matching set of business cards for the cost of shipping ($5.50) from Moo.com; your landing page background image on the front and contact details on the back. You can generate a QR code to send people with smartphones directly to your page. There's limited traffic stats, so you can see how many visitors you get (although not where they came from).
Website: https://about.me/
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