I’ve been meaning to write this post for a year and a half now. I started my website two years ago and, at first, stumbled into it.  I was (and still am) nerdy and the Internet is the frontier for nerds. So I took my initial steps onto the Internet mainly because of the technical challenges and the opportunity to be creative.  Over the last two years, I have found that there are many other benefits to building a website.  Here is a summary, but you can read more about each below:

1. •Stake your claim on the Internet frontier – There are only so many cool, memorable URLs out there (more now since they’ve opened extensions beyond .com & .net) so grab yours while it’s still available.
   

2. •Get a job – A well designed website can serve as an extension of your resume and a personalized, domain specific e-mail can make you look tech savvy and professional.
   

3. •Discover your audience – Using analytics code on your site can give you insight into who’s interested in your content, what about your site interest them, and how they’re finding you.
   

4. •Brand yourself – Our lives are spread across the Internet these days. You can create a central hub that brings all of those disparate social media identities together.
   

Stake your claim on the Internet frontier

If the Internet is the frontier than your domain is your homestead.  Much of the good “land” is already taken in the .com space, but as new extensions (.co, .info, .tv, etc.) come online there is an opportunity to grab a domain that suits you well and is easy for people to remember.  But why should you be interested in claiming a domain at all?  At this point, if you think this Internet thing is just a fad, you’re not paying close attention.  Back in the 1990’s, McDonalds didn’t think the Internet was going to catch on and someone purchased the URL www.mcdonalds.com. When they finally understood what the Internet was going to become they had to go to court to claim that name.  Don’t find yourself scrambling to be www.johnsmith2358.com because you waited too long to claim your name.

Owning a domain is very versatile. You don’t even have to set up a website.  You can have that URL redirect to some place where you’re already set up on the Internet (like Facebook or Google+).  The important thing is claiming the name.  I found as I went to apply for Gmail and Twitter accounts that someone had used my usual screen name (brandonkopp).  I ended up having to go with an alternate (brandonmkopp). This was confusing for my friends who already knew the brandonkopp name so several e-mails and tweets got sent to the other Brandon.  When I saw this I jumped at the chance to claim brandonkopp.com.

Get a job

I don’t have direct evidence to back this up, but I think my website helped me get my job.  In addition to someone who is a team player and has certain job specific skills, employers are increasingly looking for people who have computer and technical skills.  What shows off those skills better than a well-made website?  At the very least it shows you know something about Internet navigation, word processing, and web building software.  Depending on how your website is built you can also show your creativity and your skills with programming languages like HTML and desktop publishing software.  An employer can assume (safely perhaps) that if you can build a website you must know how to use Microsoft Office. 

Anything that further showcases these skills is only going to help you secure a job.  For example, when I purchased my domain name and web hosting from GoDaddy, I was able to set up custom, URL-specific e-mail addresses.  So instead of putting a Gmail ,Yahoo, or even a university e-mail address at the top of my resume I could put employment(/at/)brandonkopp.com.  To the extent the custom address gets noticed, that’s one thing that sets you apart from the countless other people applying for that job.  I also used that as a way of subtly coaxing potential employers to look at my website.  Rather than be in their face and list my website directly, I’d list the e-mail address and allow them to check it out if they’re curious, and some were (find out how I know it worked in “Discover Your Audience” section below).

I also made the website an extension of my resume.  On the Psychologist page, I had additional material that wasn’t quite important enough to put on a resume but still gives off a professional vibe.  To make it easy to find, I had links on the homepage that said “Employers: find out more about my professional background here.”  By designing a page that shows a number of different aspects of my life (including my military career and photography hobby), employers who made it to the website were able to get a better sense of who I am and what I would be like to work with.  I’ve heard that a lot of employers will scour Twitter and Facebook to find out information about potential employees.  Having a well-made, resume-like website will help you put your best foot forward.

Discover your audience

Whatever your reasons for building a website, whether personal, professional, or both, you can get a sense of who’s interested in the same things you are.  By connecting web analytics code (e.g., Google Analytics) to your webpages you can get feedback on what webpages are popular, where people are visiting from, and how they’re finding your site.  You don’t get information about specific people but you do get summary statistics about your website visitors.

I have found this information interesting in a number of ways. First of all, I’m a numbers guy and love to see statistics.  l also love to see that people are interested in what I’m putting out there.  You can see my summary of statistics from the first year of Brandonkopp.com.  I was excited to see that my Kuwait Deployment page seemed to be getting a lot of traffic from search engines, and it still does.  I get to see the keywords people type in like “What to pack for a deployment to Kuwait” and hopefully people found what they were looking for on my page and found it helpful.

Secondly, Google Analytics helped me gauge the application process when I was applying for jobs (what I referred to earlier).  If I submitted an application for a job in Orlando, FL and suddenly there’s a hit on my website from Orlando, I know that someone has seen my application.  Big companies and government agencies often serve as their own Internet Service Providers so occasionally you can see if people from some company you applied to are visiting your website.  Furthermore, you can see what pages they viewed and how long they stayed, giving you a sense of how interested they may be.  Now all of this may just be a vanity exercise (and I’ve been told can seem creepy) but I prefer to think of it as gathering information.  After all, if an employer if visiting your site, they’re there to gather information on you.

Brand yourself

I read every day about how the Internet has changed the way people interact.  People don’t think twice about posting random, potentially embarrassing things on their Facebook page, yet everyone is concerned about security and privacy.  A website, unlike Facebook or Twitter or Google+ gives you the opportunity to build something unique from the ground up.  You decide how to display your content and what content there is to display.  And the sky’s the limit.  You can create unique content (blog posts, videos, photos), you can add logos, a favicon, and other material to let people know that this is your unique footprint on the Internet.  You can then leverage that identity to get a job, sell a product, or just find people who share your interests.

I’m still working on this branding idea, both as a professional research psychologist and an amateur photographer.  I started a separate blog (www.phototourismdc.com) and another site to sell my photos (photography.brandonkopp.com), I have social media sites all over the place from Google+, to Twitter, to Flickr, to LinkedIn.  What ties all of these disparate social media identities together is this site, brandonkopp.com.  Now that I’ve purchased a domain and I’ve gotten people attached to the idea of Brandon Kopp as a photographer, research psychologist, etc., I can set up “subdomains” that easily refer them to photography.brandonkopp.com to buy my photos rather than having to give them a long URL or try to spell out a bit.ly URL. It’s easily memorable if I want to give it out in casual conversation and it reinforces the “brand” of brandonkopp.com.  I can do the same thing with flickr.brandonkopp.com, twitter.brandonkopp.com, google.brandonkopp.com, or linkedin.brandonkopp.com.  All are easily said and all are easily remembered for someone who knows me and knows what Twitter (or any other site) is.  And the best part is, if you’re interested in finding me on YouTube, at this point I don’t even have to tell you what that URL is, you already know.