The Basics
An impressive personal website or blog should showcase some form of the following materials:
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A strong landing page,
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An “about” page that details your personal interests and strengths,
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A résumé page,
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A “clips” or dossier-style page, and
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A contact page.
Any links to your work on social media or personal social media sites should direct the reader to professionally appropriate content. All links should work: Remove dead links.
Please turn your résumé and clips in your dossier into PDF files before uploading these files to your website.
The Branding
An excellent overall presentation of one’s brand will clearly and memorably define for the reader what words, phrases, symbols, visuals, or colors signify your creative profile. Avoid using clichés and stilted language. Use design to emphasize your point (layout, typography, titles, headings); and apply the appropriate level of formality, multicultural sensitivity, creativity, netiquette, and grammatical correctness.
For a modern take on branding, check out this Forbes feature. Also, you can try one of these three exercises to help pinpoint what your personal brand is or could become. You might also freewrite a bit in response to these questions:
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If you could summarize your personal brand in three words or fewer, what would they be? Why?
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How does this brand match your strengths?
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How does this brand reflect the job you're pursuing?
The Design
Good branding is backed by good design. It's worth understanding the basics of CRAP design principles (color, repetition, alignment, and proximity).
Or better yet, have you heard of CRAYONTIP? See below or read the explanation from The Visual Communication Guy.
The Résumé
A strong résumé will carry your brand through its page (and second page, but no more than two, please). To explore highly effective visual résumés, check out this blog post from Dr. Elliott's Professional Writing class.
The Examples
You can google around to find strong examples online pretty easily, but here are a few examples we can discuss: