What does a modern personal/portfolio website look like today?

[bernard]

I want to get a combined personal/business website, which should have several features:

• Front page with 1 or more personal pictures
• Services (sales page)
• "As seen in/on" (portfolio page of mentions and stuff I've written to media)
• Blog

Did you notice anyone having such a page that you thought looked good?

 

[Ryuzaki]

I think there's a lot of pressure to make a portfolio site look extra amazing, but realistically I don't think it's important. I think user experience and a clean presentation of the information still wins.

What you've described seems to follow the trend I feel like I've seen where pure portfolio sites have been left behind as have the personal sites. I see the trend as being a regular old website with personal branding. And the domain often doesn't include the person's name any more.

I "blame" three people for this:

• Pat Flynn @ Smart Passive Income
• Brian Dean @ Backlinko
• Neil Patel @ NeilPatel.com

Notice how they're all starting to look very similar:

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I tossed in a site I hadn't heard of before this morning at the end: OneHourProfessor. Here's NicheSiteProject.com:

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We could do this all day. The trend seems to be minimal and flat design without any frills. Just cutting straight to the information. That's especially if you're not a web designer or UI tweaker, etc.

Of course, then you have an example of going completely overboard, like the SEO Ancient of Old Bruce Clay's new design. But if you strip away all of the flashy and moving parts, it's not any different than the ones I posted above.

All of this is a big departure from the old "business card" websites we used to make for portfolio sites just to have an online presence. They're now full blown websites and treated as such, just backed by a personal brand. And why not? There's huge money to be earned if you can first earn trust through transparency and consistency of quality. And this "full blown website" should be the top of the funnel.

 

[bernard]

Thanks @Ryuzaki, that's exactly the inspiration I'm looking for.

When we're talking about old portfolio/business cards being dead, and the trend being a niche website with personal branding, would you still want to include non-niche stuff? Like, if you've been featured in multiple niches, like some people are.

Writers and journalists as an example. You have your journalism, you have your business writing services, you have your debating business, maybe you run a website on a hobby niche.

How would you handle that, would you split it up into different websites, or keep it on one site? Maybe blog about all those topics? Personally, I would be the most worried about anything that looks like politics, even if it technically isn't, because that turns potential clients off fast if they don't agree.

 

[Ryuzaki]

@bernard, I'd ask myself what the purpose of this website is for. Then act accordingly. If you're building it to sell a service, then I'd try to keep it focused on that.

If I was a journalist / writer / copywriter, then I'd include all of that, but I wouldn't include anything about my golf hobby site. It's too off-topic. I'd mention it perhaps, only in passing to say that I write, write, write.

It's kind of like an adult's resume. Eventually you have to go back in and scrub out the crap like "Honor Roll Student in High School 4 years in a row" and "Chess Club Captain and Senior Class President". Nobody cares. That may have helped when we get our first fast food job, but not when we're applying for a salaried position or selling services.

And yeah, leave politics out unless that's your actual business. It's one of the basic, most fundamental rules of business and polite society, to leave politics out of it. Dummies are so radicalized now that they're losing half of their customer base by opening their big fat mouths. Gillette did that recently and posted a 5.24 billion loss in one quarter. It's just dumb and has nothing to do with business.

I wouldn't make multiple sites. Big money comes from being specialized. I'd choose what my sole purpose of building the site is (maybe to sell make-up products) and leave anything unrelated to that off of the site. Focus and specialization is the name of the game when it comes to this kind of thing, I think. You don't want to be the Jack of All Trades and the Master of None in the eyes of your potential clients.

 

[DanielS]

And yeah, leave politics out unless that's your actual business. It's one of the basic, most fundamental rules of business and polite society, to leave politics out of it. Dummies are so radicalized now that they're losing half of their customer base by opening their big fat mouths.

I had a sales call yesterday with a 20-something from Maine and the first topic that came out of his mouth was Donald Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. This wasn't the reason why I declined working with him (budget was) but it immediately knocked a point or two off of my "how did that call go" scale. Not to mention the fact that it wasn't relevant to the whole point of the sales call to begin with.

 

[CashCowAdv]

@bernard

Depends on the service you're selling.

If you're selling yourself, then you should use a picture of yourself to establish immediate trust. (Psychology is involved in this - it's called a cue. When a website shows a picture of its owner, visitors are subconsciously less suspicious of the credibility of the service because they understand the business/website wouldn't reveal the owner's picture publically if the service is a load of shit.)

If you're selling a service where the tool used is a priority, like towing, it makes sense to prioritize a picture of a towing car towing a car than to put a picture of the business owner's face on the homepage (although the latter doesn't hurt because of the reason stated above).

And I can attest that UI drastically affects conversions and user-engagement because aesthetics is the first impression. By making the right impression and doing minimal link building (DR of 3) my website now ranks #1 and outranks DR 50+ fat boys.

I have superior UI compared to my competitors. Therefore when I initially leaked traffic to my website via GMB, I'm assuming they stayed much longer on my page than my competitors and bounced much less frequently which showed drastic positive signals to Google and caused tremendous strides in SERP. I bought 1-3 GP links and a few citation links. That's it.

(I was actually barely getting my foot wet into IM during this time and this website was an experiment for lead-gen since I was growing weary of a business model that required me to physically stay involved 24/7)

Progress:

 

[GrandMaster]

Gillette did that recently and posted a 5.24 billion loss in one quarter. It's just dumb and has nothing to do with business.

Speaking of Gillette - owned by Procter & Gamble, not learning their lesson from the first time of pissing off their customers base, they decided to alienate their 100% female base through their Tampax brand: Tampax Gets Feminist Backlash for Touting ‘Diversity of All People Who Bleed,’ Biology Is Not Bigotry

Tweet:

https://twitter.com/x/status/1305952342504767491

I don't know who's running P&G now-a-days but they've got to get it together. They are pissing off men, they are pissing off women - only thing left is "other" for them.

 

[_fish]

I am here with very good news for Proctor and Gamble! It's only very-online and way too bored Twitter snowflakes who care enough to virtue signal about changing brands over something like this.

If you think any significant amount of women are going to change which brand of cotton they shove inside of their bleeding cunts because of a Tweet that 99.9999% of P&G customers will never even see then you might need to get off Twitter and go for a walk and try to talk to some women because you're way too caught up in identity politics and it's hurting your ability to think critically as a marketer.

Go look up the % of people who use Twitter. I will wait. The % of them who ever tweet. The % of those tweets that ever get seen. It's a sliver of a sliver. It's nothing. We're here talking about a fraction of a rounding error of triggered men and post-menopausal women as if it matters to the world's largest tampon brand. U SRS BRUH??

Forget about internet people. Let's talk about real people. They still exist. Real people care about paying their rents and mortgages. They care about watching football, drinking some beers, seeing what dumb shit the Kardashians are up to, and wanting a better life for their kids. They sure as hell don't give any semblance of a fuck about what some tampon brand tweets about or how other individuals lawfully express themselves.

Most people don't even care enough about real politics to vote in the local elections that actually impact their lives and you think they're going to care enough to go out of their way to buy a different brand of Tampons than the ones they already like to use... because of a Tweet? Maybe a Tweet has that much power over you. Not most people. You're not doing yourself any favors as a marketer when you're this out of touch.

You're giving P&G attention. This is their goal with any marketing. Outrage marketing works on both sides. How do people still not realize this on a MARKETING forum? Marvel can announce a movie with a woman starring in it and they know that an army of one million neckbeards are going to do 40% of their viral marketing for them.

P&G knows a handful of people with disproportionately large voices are going to spend 3 days crying about this Tweet and it's really not going to matter. It's going to get them free exposure. If P&G is very lucky then some of these very bored and very online people will post videos burning their tampons and it will make the news and it will make the "news". Then some other very online people will go buy 15 boxes of tampons to pose next to on social media. Most people don't care about the idpol behind it. They'll see the brand. They'll forget about this in a week. In 3 weeks when their little coochies start to ooze again, they'll buy Tampax again just like they always have. They like Tampax because it feels better to stuff inside of themselves than the store brand and that's why they buy it and that's why they will continue to buy it and nothing else.

We're talking about fractions of fractions of customers that will ever even see or hear about this, and an even smaller fraction that will care in either direction, and even smaller fractions of those fractions of fractions that will alter their buying patterns. It's a blip of a blip of a blip but if you're in the media it's great bait, mate.

Maybe you care a lot about this. Maybe it upsets you to see stuff like this. But that's because you are in a bubble. You have the luxury to care about what a tampon brands tweets but do you even buy tampons? If you're an online magazine then you steer into it but otherwise you need to separate yourself mentally from your tiny little bubble of people who care enough about this to share it. I'm not pointing this out to make an attack at you. I want you to be better at marketing. That's why you are here right? That's why we are all here. It's not about arguing about Twitter idpol. You're here sharing an article that was created to get you upset so that you'd share it and you don't even realize you took the bait.

Who has time to argue on the internet with the holiday season right around the corner? It's about understanding the people who buy things by looking past your own limited bias and bubble. I can bring numbers and not just feelings. But first.

I need you to take a leap of faith for me.

I need you to humor me.

This is might a radical far out concept but please grant me this one thing and maybe we can both gain some new insights together.

Is it possible that the people in charge of a 340 billion dollar company know a thing or two about marketing and making money? Maybe a little better than people who are raging on Twitter about the story of the day? Maybe companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars know what they're doing and it's hilarious for you to dismiss it like "who is even in charge over there?!" If you think you're better then put up. Something tells me you aren't building the next billion dollar brand if you're spending your time reading and sharing outrage bait but prove me wrong.

Is it possible that maybe you're the one being marketed to and getting caught up in fake outrage culture? It seems to work. Here you are sharing content from multiple sources. One of those pieces of content is an ad for P&G from over a month ago. The other piece of content is an outrage bait article that makes money off ad impressions.

Welcome my son, welcome to the machine.

Or do you have such little faith in capitalism and the markets that you think the people leading one of the largest and most ruthless companies in the world don't know what they're doing? They're just tweeting things out for fun to tank their brand because they believe so strongly in inclusivity?

I'm sure the 80 year old board members of P&G are taking victory laps on their Tumblr accounts right now. This reminds me of when someone on here tried to say Wal-Mart was dying off. They're tanking upwards!

But back to Proctor and Gamble. They started the year with a $120 share price. Their low on the year was $97 when everything went down across the board, and now they're at $137 with a high of $145. Their share price when they killed their brand with that tweet? $137. AND that's without cherry picking the lowest lows and the highest highs. If I wanted to cherry pick like all of the moronic lefties on Twitter who complain and mislead about how much money billionaires have made during the pandemic by comparing the LOWEST LOWS to the HIGHEST HIGHS well then P&G looks even better because that's $97 to $145 within the past year but I don't even need to use Bernie Math™ to make this point!

Look at this. Another company that is tanking upwards!

They hit their ALL TIME HIGH share price just two weeks ago.

But please go off about how they have incompetent leadership.

Damn I guess non binary people must be buying a FUCK LOAD of tampons for their bussies or........ could it be that the tiny vocal minority of snowflakes crying about it on Twitter don't actually matter as much as they think they do when they get 10k retweets from bots and you need to pay less attention to the people who collect ad dollars by tricking you into caring about insignificant shit like this?

I hope you can find a way to play this off and justify it to fit your bias again. We'll all get to see it happen in real time and everyone who is still thinking critically out there will observe and learn from it. Everyone else will continue to get left behind.

Unless you want to argue that share prices are a terrible indicator of a company's success right now because they are being propped up across the board by unprecedented deficit spending and we should ignore the stock market as a sign of economic prosperity for the time being because it's going to come crashing down as soon as the deficit spending slows. I don't think I'd have a good argument to refute that point so if you want to completly own my entire post with that silver bullet, be my guest.

I'm sure there will be someone to come here to post the P&G chart next time the markets crash and to pretend it's because of this Tweet. I'll look forward to it but I hope we're all a little more savvy by then. Also I hope we've all focused more on getting good at marketing so that we've got enough cash on hand to take advantage of the crash like good little entrepreneur boys and girls.