Public meetings / Minisites / A multi-persona site platform for independent professionals - yet another web site authoring platform
Reference
Summary: This is an overview to explain some assumptions about the multirole, or multi-persona site platform that I am working on. In this work, I am trying to learn more about the possible phenomenon, or struggle, or need that some users may have, related to the need to maintain different pages for themselves, with different audiences, with different life goals. If you see something or feel this may make sense, please help with ideas or references.
Parent project: mini sites platform, a platform for individuals and their multiple roles in life
Reference meetings: "a06-230 — minisites — mgalli — series minisites - multipersona overview fe56bed9-e6eb-4d4d-90c7-29cd629e300a Monday, January 13⋅11:15am – 12:15pm" with parent "a06-210 — minisites — overview — 32c27a52-16af-42a3-bd65-42ae62e3a9ca Monday, January 13⋅10:00 – 11:00am"
Participants: Marcio S Galli
- Text Language: en-US
- Tags: About us, Personal web pages, Persona, Mini personal site platform, episodes, series of notes, drafts publishing, continuous publishing, milestone-driven publishing
Introduction and the notion of multi-persona
At this point, you should consider that this project is under discovery phase and the "multi-persona" concept is an exploration.
This exploration of the multi-persona site concept started out of my intention to create another personal web page for myself using a development framework — sort of reinventing the wheel. I wrote a personal site with an initial criteria — to be simple, fast, and to have the user interface following the user experience of professional platforms. Because I wanted the design to focus in the person, in the human, I end up following the design of profile pages done by designers of a great meditation app from San Francisco. This initial work showed good results because I was able to help about 3-4 people to launch their personal sites — mostly friends and family.
While some of these users didn't have any problem, my case was different. The problem with my site profile had to do with the mixed experiences I acquired over a career. Because of a founder-role, and because I also work as consultant, and developer, I found myself sort of making too many sections for the site: the front-end role, the back-end role, the entrepreneur, the consultant, and more.
Struggle
At this stage, I had also noticed that my LinkedIn profile had the same problem. I noticed it was too complex, specially when I needed to send my LinkedIn profile for specific career opportunities such as front-end developer. I suspected — maybe this is quite obvious to you — that my multirole page was creating confusion to a potential employer. Thus, there is a problem because I wanted to be specific and yet I wanted to be truthful to myself.
Personal landing pages experiments working
It's important to note that at this time I had other 4 users using the platform — mostly friends. I noticed how effective some of the specific pages were. One was for a psychologist, an incredibly fast and simple page that worked perfectly as a landing page for an ad campaign. For another person, a civil engineer, it was also very good. This was also the case of a bass professor site. To summarize, on one hand, I had specific pages for them. On the other hand, my personal site was sort of an all-in-one personal page that was not much useful except to myself.
Looking at this situation pushed me to break my all-in-one web page into multiple landing pages. Once broken, I thought, it would be more meaningful to specific audiences. I also suspected that different publishing channels would help me to organize better the activities around my goals; not counting the benefit of having specific landing pages to be used for campaigns or sharing.
But the first experiment wasn't my case. It came out of the bass professor web site. As I started to work, he eventually revealed that he could also be a professor of guitar. But he also had other projects, such as his writing projects. This was the moment that I noticed that we had to be more specific for each of his landing pages, to avoid a case like mine. While we are not 100% sure, at least for him I am making multiple pages:
- http://jorgecontrabaixo.taboca.com/ (Jorge's bass professor page)
- http://jorgeviolao.taboca.com/ (Jorge's guitar professor page)
I am inclined to test this idea of multiple roles, or multi-personas, because of these realities — he is a bass professor, a guitar professor, a custom music author, a future writer, and maybe other things.
With that, I have decided to pay attention to the possible phenomenon — and this is where I am now. Trying to organize the potential features that may have alignment with needs of customers that may have multiple roles. Of course, anyone can create a different new page using any platform. But anyway this is myself in discovery phase.
As a platform, in this MVP iteration, the system also helps with the generation of business card graphics and office letterhead. Examples:
While is not clear that this platform will thrive, there is an active development in parallel with discovery. I also understand that the customers currently using are not exactly representative of a possibly future customer base.
Related or referenced notes
Comment at Lisa Gable post related to Why We Need Older Woman in the Workplace — "Hi Lisa, I am investigating the potential for what I so far call a multirole or multi-persona platform, I feel that may have some alignment with what you highlighted (gig economy and phenomenon in which woman engages in pathways not driven by the too straight job-only drive. Notice I have nothing in my platform, is mostly articulation that people would possibly need multiple sites for themselves not as a means to hide one out of the other but as a means to, in the end, recollect or enable themselves, and the world, to better understand the holistic arc that makes life better. http://www.mgalli.com/a/meeting-minisites-overview-multipersona-concept-discovery"
Clone of this article — On Linked In Marcio's page