Branding

As of April 2, 2015, I am a proud first-time owner of my very own domain name and feel slightly irresponsible for buying it “on a whim” (not really on a whim, but it was sort of out of the blue yesterday afternoon while I was waiting for my train to come) but at the same time excited to see where this blog/site/resume/experiment can go.

For the time being, I’ve picked a theme and color scheme to go along with what was on my old blog, which, since it was a free version of WordPress, gave me very limited options. I think I do better with limited options, because it just forces me to pick my favorite out of the bunch.

Now that I have free rein of how to design my own site, though, I’m feeling a little overwhelmed as to what I should do. I really want to try creating my own very simple, minimal layout and theme, and I know there are a lot of other themes already out there, but part of the reason why I wanted to create this site was to practice coding and designing – so I shall jump headfirst into it.

I don’t know how to “brand” myself though. Do I pick girly, feminine colors? Do I go with the curly cursive script fonts, or with bold serif fonts? Do I want to exude edginess or cuteness? This is the dilemma I find myself in when shopping for clothes as well. Does it throw people off if I am all over the place with my style?

In a company, yes. I’ve had first hand experience during user testing and feedback of our company website that they felt thrown off when they visited the homepage, saw one thing, and visited other pages within the same website and saw other things. People expect to see the same.

So I definitely see the necessity for branding – but as much as I think branding is good, it feels really limiting to me. What if I don’t like the branding I’ve picked two months down the line? Then I just have to go and change everything. How do you decide the direction to go in for ever and ever and ever?

Forgive my dramatics, but thinking long term is good, right?

Anyways, all that setup was just to say – sorry, but this site is mine and I will decide what to do with it, and if I wake up one morning and decide to go in a completely different direction then ha! I will.