This is going to be the last instalment of the personal rebranding series. After deciding on a direction for my Twitter, Instagram, Youtube and Publish0x accounts, I needed to revamp my website. I decided to go with only 2 basic pages: a link tree and a video portfolio, as this website will be business focused for my (future) clients. After I decided what to feature, I needed to figure out the style.
Since it's just a couple pages that are not going to change every other day, I chose not to use a CMS (like wordpress) and do everything in static HTML files instead. I went with Bootstrap for styling because of its ease of use and deployment, its natural responsive features, and my previous experience working with the framework.
I also wanted to change the vibe of my brand. For years now, both my website and my official business documents (logo, quotes, invoices) are themed using red as the only color. Red is my favorite color so it felt natural to use it when I started out. But after a while using it, I started to get a feeling that it was a bit too aggressive, too harsh. I'm no expert in color psychology, but it's just obvious that red is intense (and usually a good color to use when you're selling food, which is not at all what I'm doing). I wanted something lighter, less intense. I also wanted the whole website to be basically black (gray) and white, with just one touch of color here and there. I've been using GreenGeeks as a hosting provider for a while, because of their environmentally friendly business model, and they offer "badges" that you can put on your website to state that you're doing your part for the planet by using them. These badges (icons) are, of course, green. And that's when it struck me: green makes sense as my brand color. I'm an environmentalist, I take wildlife photography, my favorite thing to do is spend time in nature. If I'm going to use only one color, it should be green.
It's lighter, gives a sense of trust and cleanliness to the brand, and it just looks nice. So I chose it as my accent color for my website, and I changed my logo and my business documents templates.
Before
After
The video portfolio page has an about me section and a selection of both client work and personal projects. Until recently, my Youtube channel was my "portfolio", but I figured it would be better to have a dedicated page where I could include client work that is not on Youtube. I decided to go with 3 videos tops per client/project, in order to keep it light and breezy, and to force myself to choose only good content I wanted to be featured. This page is supposed to show potential clients what I do and who I work with, and for that I needed to give them an easy access to all the videos. I also wanted to avoid hosting all the videos on my server, Youtube figured out how to handle videos in a great way a while ago and I was not about to reinvent the wheel here. The problem was that, as I mentioned before, some client work is not featured on Youtube but on Facebook or other platforms, and I wanted all the videos to be displayed uniformly on the portfolio. So I decided to upload some client work on my own channel, as unlisted videos, and voila! I can now use Youtube embeds for all the videos I want to show.
The link tree has all of my social links (Twitter, two Instagram accounts, my stock footage portfolios, this blog, my freelancer profiles, LinkedIn and Buy me a coffee), a link to the portfolio page, and a buy me a coffee widget for good samaritans who like my work and want to support me. A lot of alternatives exist for social link trees, but hosting it on my own website has some advantages: it drives people to it, I can use the analytics I already have set up, and I already pay for this website hosting and domain anyway, so why pay for another service that will just give me a list of links I can easily make myself?
You can visit the website here: portfolio and social links.
So there you have it, the final step of my rebranding. I am now all set up and brand new on the internet, literally, and I can get my focus back onto creating content following the guidelines and objectives I set myself: professional video work on the website, wildlife photography on Instagram, content for creators on Publish0x and Buy Me a Coffee, fun and creative (and eventually helpful) content on Youtube, and everything on Twitter.
Time to get to work!
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Buy Me A Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/piliz
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/PierreLizetVideo
Twitter: https://twitter.com/PierreLizet
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pierre__lizet
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Thumbnail credits: Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash
