I love finding free and code-less ways to help people accomplish their web needs. Specifically for this reason I started to mess around with different ways of using about.me.
Typical about.me
about.me lets you create a single splash page that can link out to other websites. It’s intended for personal splash pages like this little exercise in narcissism… DavidSpira.net (It’s a work in progress, and so is the Behance profile).
That profile is built from the stock stuff that about.me provides, then I purchased the domain davidspira.net from Hover.com, and mapped the domain to my about.me page. It was simple, and took me about an hour… It would have been less if I had been less finicky about the typography.
Eventually I will browbeat Mark Krajnak into shoot a new portrait of me to serve as the background.
Holding Page
Here’s a less typical application of about.me for you.
After many years in education, my mother is starting a new college counseling business.
I’ve been doing my best to help her get it off the ground, but one thing she needed was a placeholder web page so that she could put her URL on her business cards
I don’t code a ton these days, but I could make a single holding page in HTML, the thing is that if my mom wanted to make a change, I would have to change it, and that’s a pain for everyone.
So I threw together a quick holding page in about.me. It has everything you would want in a holding page (StepByStepCollege.com):
- Business name
- Description of the business
- Teaser of what’s to come
- Email button
- When the logo is finished, we can add that too
The beauty of this is that my mom is in complete control of the page, if she wants to make a change, she can do it simply, and without having to ask anyone for help. It makes both of our lives easier.
When we’re ready to launch the real site, we will, but until then, she doesn’t have a dead link.
The Geek Whisperer 