Got a Domain Calling Card?

For my newest next (unblogged) project happening all too soon, I am helping an organization in a project where educators most likely new to the concept will be setting up a Domain of Their Own (yes, of course, supported via Reclaim Hosting).

And as many know, the result of people’s first peek at cpanel is a bit of a bewildering look…

flickr photo by EYECCD shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) license

More on that later.

What I want to do is avoid the notion of a domain as a one site stop, as the first thing many people do (ahem, me) is out a WordPress blog at the top of their domain.

There is nothing wrong with that, but it ends up being limiting IMHO when one really has the option to put many different things on their property than one blogging room.

The plan is to have them create first, at the front door, a simple calling card site at the top of the domain, and add a blog and maybe a portfolio or photo gallery site as subdomains.

Tim Owens has offered a great idea to use the cpanel Site Publisher as a first stop in their domain; it offers a form driven interface for creating a simple landing site. This way they can have something to show right away rather than trying to sort out the WordPress interface (see the bewildered look above).

Afterwatd, they can always go back and maybe add something else in it’s place, but to me, it really helps set the stage that a domain is not one site.

I’ve been playing around myself with an HTML5up theme at my own “Calling Card Site” http://cog.dog (which I have also ported into a WP theme). I recently did a small project doing some custom work on this theme for a landing page site for Claire Major (who sidelined the defunct blog she had at that URL)

That’s a bit advanced for what we will start with. I’m seeking the one screen kind of site with name, image, some social media links, like the Identity one from HTML5up (with Tim’s help, these will be added to all Reclaim histed cpanels).

If you have suggestions for other static HTML templates that are on those in order of simplicity, please suggest.

But that’s not what I seek in this post (forgetting my own lesson toot bury the ask, but hey, it’s my blog).

I would like to have some examples of educator or artists who have a simple calling card site, that we can use as examples for participants to explore. So if you have one, or have seen one, please tweet ’em to me (@cogdog) or drop some URLs in the bucket below (I especially am interested in Canadian ones as that is a hint for where this project is).

A few I thought of, though some are blog fronts, that’s okay, I want to offer a range of ways educators represent themselves through their own domains:

• http://edtechfactotum.com/
• http://miazamoraphd.com/
• http://audreywatters.com/
• http://clairemajor.net/
• http://about.digis.im/
• http://kimjaxon.com/
• https://dougbelshaw.com/
• http://www.amyburvall.com/

That was but 10 minutes of neurons firing after only one cup of coffee.

So if you know of or have yourself a cool calling card at the top of your domain, please share.

Featured Image: Charles Bontems (1890) calling card public domain image in Wikimedia Commons “A label of the defunct company Bontems.” There is some kind of moral there.

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