How to Use Flavors.me to Create Nice Personal Websites

It’s not surprising of employers these days to look for personal websites to get to know their applicants better. If you maintain a personal site/blog, you certainly have some kind of edge over the herd. Whether you want to use this situation to communicate your qualifications and skills, or if you simply want a place where people can find out more about you and connect with you, a personal website seems like a wise thing to create in this age.

If you don’t know HTML or don’t have the time to mess with hosted solutions like Blogger or WordPress, you can use a free and easy solution: Flavors.me. Simply put, Flavors.me is a host that allows users to create personal websites (in a way, similar to WordPress or Tumblr). It has a basic layout and a very streamlined interface. Here’s how you can get started:

1. Sign Up for Flavors.me

You can choose to sign up with Facebook Connect, your Google account, or your Yahoo! account. I don’t particularly like integrating everything together, so I decided just to sign up the normal way. This is a simple, one-step process — my favorite approach to signing up.

2. Customize your Name and Information

The first thing you’ll want to do is modify the default information.

The bulk of your content will be lying in the About section of your page, where you can input a variety of things. For example, I’ve seen people put in a refined version of their resume, or just a simple paragraph that speaks more about their interests and skills and compliments what they had on their resume. I’ve seen people put their name in the Name box, but I’ve also seen some cooler designs and I think a question engages readers more. That’s just me though, ultimately you want to do something that you’re comfortable with.

Flavors.me allows for minor use of HTML tags, most of them text modifiers. I’m hoping that heading tags will be compatible in the future.

3. Modify your Design

Make your page stand out from the dull default theme. You can choose from a variety of Layouts and Colors to customize your page. Ton of options unavailable in the free version of Flavors.me can be unlocked by upgrading to the Premium version for $20/year.

I’m a firm believer of picking your own color scheme, as I really want to minimize the possibility of my site looking exactly like someone else’s. You can create your own palette by clicking the Custom icon.

You might also want to choose to adjust your fonts. I like using big, bolder text for my headings and more ordinary fonts for my writing — so something like ChunkFive is a perfect font for my heading and Arial is good for passages of text. Depending on the objective of your website, you might want to be more conservative or more expressive with your text. There’s a pretty diverse selection of fonts, although you’d have to upgrade to get access to all fonts.

4. Integrate your Feeds

Integrating feeds from your social media accounts (Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, StumbleUpon, etc…) into your Flavors.me webpage is a breeze.

Keep in mind if you’re expecting your potential employers to view this, you might want to be less candid in your streams with your out-of-office activities and rants. Just a heads up!

5. Promote your Page

You can also make yourself more visible by promoting your page through different avenues: social media, on the web through a link (i.e. when you are commenting on blogs, you can now use your Flavors.me URL), and through SEO metadata (although that’s a paid feature).

Why Upgrade?

Besides more fonts and SEO metadata, there are a ton of reasons to upgrade! For example, you can re-route a custom domain to your Flavors.me page, which generally contributes to your page’s credibility. You can also access analytics to your page, which will give you an idea how well your promotional results are turning out. These are just a few of the perks of the upgrade, a mere $20/year.

If you liked what you saw here, give Flavors.me a whirl. It’s free, and you can have your webpage up in minutes! Enjoy. ????