Still Don’t Have A Personal Website? Per Schmitz From Pixelhub Thinks You Should Make One ASAP
When you think about presenting yourself to the world, the first thing that probably comes to mind is the way your digital presence affects people, and how good it actually is. You probably think of your Facebook and Twitter profiles for personal showcasing, and LinkedIn for your business needs. You also probably give a thought or two about some other profiles you might have on Instagram, Snapchat or something else, but have you thought about your personal website? A place where you can be you and impress people with it. You can integrate social media with it if you like, but the page is your playground, and you can do as you please. A lot of people don’t have a clear idea about what personal websites are, so we asked Per Schmitz of Pixelhub.Me to help us understand the phenomenon.
Pixelhub is a personal website builder that combines beautiful design, easy to use interface and great ideas to give you the best website that will impress literally everyone who sees it. But considering there’s no better way to present something than to actually ask the people behind it, we asked Per what’s Pixelhub and who is the service for?
Pixelhub is a one-stop solution for professionals, freelancers or other individuals that want to actively build their online identity. We streamline the process of shaping what others see about you online. Pixelhub allows to set up a personal page, email signature, shareable vCard and personal domain in minutes. All of those are plug and play, which means that the whole platform is integrated and you don’t have to enter any information twice, we have tried to make the setup as simple as possible. Our users are busy people, so one of our main tasks was to give them a highly productive tool that wouldn’t steal their time.
So designers and professionals will have a lot of great things to say about Pixelhub, of course. Not only does it allow you to have a great personal website, but it also gives you an email signature, a vCard and a domain, something not a lot of website builders offer. This is really a great thing because we all know that email signatures are something that is really necessary but people tend to forget about them, or just make them extremely dull and not that informative. Pixelhub aims to change that and is currently succeeding in the task.
Still Don’t Have A Personal Website? Wait No More!
Personal websites are all the rage today, and even if you aren’t that familiar with the concept you must’ve seen one or two of those somewhere “in the wild”. The idea is that you build a page around your own brand, and you let everyone know a thing or two about your professional life just by browsing the page. It can really help you impress on job interviews, and in business in general, because it shows that you are devoted to branding yourself online and that you are clinching the opportunity to be just a little bit more competitive in the digital world.
Per shared some thoughts about personal websites and their importance with us and noted that a personal website is an absolute must-have solution for everyone that wants to be taken seriously today.
People will investigate about you online – that’s a fact, whether you like it or not. Chances are they’ll find tons of outdated information, some images of that flower shop owner from Michigan who happens to have the same name, and maybe some stuff from New Year’s Eve your friends have posted online. How can you gain control of this mess?
First of all, you need to assure that you have authority of one of the top Google results that come up when someone enters your name. The solution is registering a personal domain (i.e. YourName.me). Search engines love keyword combinations, and your first name + last name combination will place you right up there!
Secondly you need to take control of the content people see. This is where your personal page comes into play, it’s your chance to show the world your best, most authentic self. It’s the perfect place to streamline all your efforts and online activities and shape the way people see you.
Build Your Presence – The Way You Want It!
Shaping the way people see you is one of the most important thing these days, and you should definitely try to invest as much time as you can to nudge people in the right direction, and not bore them to tears with information that’s irrelevant or outdated. Personal website builders are pretty much made just for that, but each and every one of them has a certain twist to separate it from the rest of the competition.
We asked Per what does Pixelhub offer that helps it stand out from the rest of the tools designed for this purpose, as well as asking him what are the main advantages of Pixelhub.
Pixelhub focuses on individuality and personal content, as the purpose of a personal page is to reflect your personality. One of our main goals was to offer many customisation options and allow people to create an individual look and feel, without actually needing any experience in web design. If you know how to send an email, you will be able to build a beautiful Pixelhub page in minutes.
Surprisingly, many of the online identity platforms that are available at present don’t allow users to publish any custom content. I personally think that personal content is the lifeblood of any personal website, which is why Pixelhub allows to publish and organise unlimited content. Users can add any kind of content: text, photos, videos, slideshows, contact information (including vCard download, map, contact form), social media icons and links, real time social media feeds, calls-to-action (newsletter signup, links, PDF download, product or service sales), interests & skills and HTML custom code.
As Pixelhub offers more customisation and content options than most competitors, another important task was to create a user friendly and intuitive interface. Any content can be added or edited inline, which means that Pixelhub users don’t have to invest any time learning any administration tools, but can instantly edit anything on the page itself. Pixelhub is actually pretty fun to play around with.
That’s a lot of options, right? And the best thing is that they are all user-oriented and do not require any knowledge of web design to use. Of course, if you’re an advanced user you can always fiddle around with HTML if you so desire, and make your site stand out even more. The main goal is allowing users to choose whatever they want, offer them as many options as possible while not interfering with their idea of how the site should look, and not having them dig through endless options just to find the right one.
A Lead Generation Tool
Another important thing is the process of doing something with the leads you get once they visit your site. People will surely visit to find out more about you, and you need to do something once they do because you want to turn those visits into business offers or inquiries for your work, right? That’s why it’s very important to have your personal website act as a contact hub for yourself or your business.
You need to motivate people to do something once they visit your site, and Pixelhub allows you precisely that. We asked Per how does he view this aspect of the site, and he explained to us that the key is to have people take action, whether that is adding your vCard, or tweeting about you.
The key to converting page visits into business opportunities is to motivate people to take action.
Our vision of a contact hub is to streamline conversation. By offering different communication channels, you increase the possibility that people take action and engage. Some visitors might prefer to download your vCard to their mobile address book, because they plan to contact you at a later time. Others always need to be at the edge of conversation and prefer to send you a tweet right away to get a problem solved ASAP. All of your site visitors have personal preferences to start a conversation, other options could be email, SMS, Skype or even a personal visit at physical location. Pixelhub combines all those contact options into an accessible, easy to understand format, to increase website conversion.
This really goes to show that the Pixelhub team has really thought of everything to make your digital presence the best that it can be. Lastly, we wanted to know why did Per and his company choose .ME as their domain.
The .ME domain is the best fit when it comes to personal content. It has become the go-to domain for personal use and we think that it reflects the Pixelhub idea perfectly. Anyone knows what to expect when clicking a .ME domain, it’s just that simple. Further on it’s short, positive and fun, while many thought leaders and web-ninjas are using it – which means we’re in good company.
