About.me – All About You

When setting up a personal website seems too time consuming or costly, creating an account with About.me is the next logical solution. With About.me, people can set up custom mini-sites – also known as personal splash pages – with just enough information to pique the interest of any visitors online. Each personal page has room for a brief intro and links to as many – or as few – social networking accounts as a person wishes. About.me also makes it easy for users to see how many people are visiting their personal sites each day.

Registration on About.me is a quick and simple process, since it involves nothing more than entering your name and email address, and choosing an About.me URL. To make your page a little more robust, you can include a paragraph introducing yourself and upload a high-resolution photo to use as the background image. For a more subtle approach, use one of the free backgrounds provided by About.me instead. You can still select your own colors and fonts for the page and change the layout to give your site a custom look. Next, it’s time to add all the social networks and online services you want to link to on your page. Add links to your Flickr, Tumblr, and Facebook accounts, or add a custom URL to take visitors to your business site. About.me lets users decide whether to include a special Email Me button that visitors can use to get in contact directly.

About.me offers a handful of analytics tools that let people see how many visitors are checking out their personal pages and where those visitors are coming from. Users who add Twitter links to their page can also get access to their Klout influence scores, and they can even purchase Google Adwords to guarantee their profiles will show up when people search for certain keywords on Google. About.me has also teamed up with Moo.com to offer a free set of business cards that people can hand out at networking events to direct new associates to their About.me sites.

Practical Uses:

• Create a personal website without paying a dime
• Help control what comes up in the search engines when people Google your name
• Give friends a place to find links to all your social networking accounts
• Promote yourself by creating a professional looking website

Insider Tips:

• About.me will give users a free set up business cards from Moo.com
• Analytics tools show how many people are clicking on a site each day
• Users can buy Google Adwords to promote their About.me sites
• About.me provides links to where people can submit their profile pages to various search engines to improve their rankings

What we liked:

• About.me offers premade backgrounds for people who don’t want to use a large image of themselves on their sites
• A person can get set up and build a new site from scratch in minutes
• About.me has custom buttons for more 17 different networking sites
• Users who add their Twitter handles can get access to their Klout influence scores

What we didn’t like:

• About.me does not offer domain mapping

Alternatives:

• Flavors.me – http://flavors.me
• Hi, I’m – http://hi.im
• Magnt – http://magnt.com
• Raveal – http://raveal.com

Company Info:

• Launched: December 2010
• Privately Held
• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Founded by: Ryan Freitas, Tony Conrad, Tim Young
• Web site: http://about.me

Costs:

• Free