One site to rule them all?
Over the past few months I’ve been thinking a great deal about the direction of my business and work, and also of this blog. It’s lain dormant since May thanks to a lack of motivation on my part, and a busy schedule elsewhere.
One of the things I’ve been thinking about is creating an online portfolio of my illustrations and design work, along with a website to create leads for my business. Initially, I thought of using this blog as both a business front-end, and as a productivity and design blog. After working with this idea for some time and talking to various people about it, I’ve decided against the idea.
This decision is based on three factors:
- This blog focuses mainly on productivity and lifehacks, my portfolio site should focus on design and creativity.
- I’d like this site to have a clean, minimalist design whereas I think my portfolio site should showcase some more impressive and off-the-wall stuff.
- I have two separate audiences: prospective clients and interested readers. My readers don’t want to look at my design, and my clients don’t want to be overwhelmed by articles on productivity.
My next idea was to maintain a portfolio site with an attached blog on design and art, and focus this blog on productivity. A sensible idea? Perhaps not.
Time constraints
Although I’d like to write more, I’ve found in the past that my posting schedules are far too ambitious. I’ve got a number of commitments that draw on my time and I often find it hard to maintain this one blog, let alone two separate blogs.
This thinking led on to the idea that I could maintain two sites, but only one blog – One site hosting my portfolio and business details and this blog, covering articles on productivity and art & design. The simplest way for me to separate the two “streams” on the blog would be to offer three RSS feeds.
- A Productivity feed for my productive audience.
- An Art and Design feed for my artsy audience.
- A combined feed for the nutters who are interested in both.
After putting this to my friends, I’m convinced that this is the best way to go. If anyone thinks differently, please let me know.
The next steps
My work on a new theme for this blog is coming on nicely, as is my article on the process I’ve used to design it. Now that I’ve decided to keep my portfolio and blog separate, I’ve removed a large chunk of the work involved. Hopefully, you should see a relaunch of this site in the near future, with a new design and some flagship articles.
Assuming my other commitments don’t get in the way, and my motivation to write doesn’t decline you should also see an increase in post frequency. I intend to post about three times per week:
- Once on productivity.
- Once on art or design.
- Once with a short story or poem from my girlfriend (or perhaps something else silly).
As far as my portfolio site is concerned, I think I’ll wait until I’ve got this project sorted before I embark on that.