I finally got my invitation to complete my profile on the new social aggregator site About.Me. I had reserved my name after I saw an announcement on TechCrunch a few weeks ago. So if you haven’t already done that, you might want to head over to their sign-up page and reserve your name.
Well after logging into you account, the first thing you will be prompted to do is add your basic profile information. First, you’ll need to add your first and last name, your biography, and a decide if you want visitors to able to email you. Don’t sweat it, if you don’t have biography ready, you can change it later from the edit profile section.
About.Me Service Options
With that simple step, your default profile is ready, but right off the bat, you may want to add links to your social persona. A small word to the wise, this step will flow a lot smoother if you’re already logged into a service, so keep that in mind before starting this step. Click on the “Add a Site” button and you’ll be prompted to add your various social links. About.Me includes links to the following services: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Blogger, Posterous, Flickr, TypePad, FourSquare, or any URL or RSS. If you don’t want to fiddle around with this step, you can always tweak your services from the “Edit profile” and Services section of your profile.
Choosing your profile background
From examining some of their sample profile pages, the overwhelming majority include a photograph, so if you don’t have a high resolution photograph of yourself, stop now and go find or take a suitable picture. To add your profile picture click on the “EDIT” button on the top banner of the site just to the right of “Profile.” As with most social sites like Twitter of FriendFeed, you can use your own photograph or choose one of the custom backgrounds. You can also kick it low tech and skip the background and just use a minimalist blank background.
When choosing your background image, there’s one key design concept to keep in mind. You need to save some “dead” space on your background to display your profile information. If you’re not sure what I mean by that, just take a look at some of the custom backgrounds and look for an empty space in the images. That’s where you’re going to position your profile.
I was lucky to find the perfect picture for my profile from a camping trip at Luquillo Beach, here in lovely Puerto Rico. I selected a width of 1050, but from examining some of the sample profiles, there didn’t seem to be a best choice for width. After selecting your image and uploading, you may want to exit the edit profile option to see how your profile block matches your image.
Positioning your profile block
Reposition Handle for About.Me Profile
Now it took me a few moments to figure out how to reposition the About.Me profile block, but it’s really simple once you see the handle. Look in the upper right hand corner just beside your name for the little block symbol. That’s the handle. Once you are back in the default page, all you need to do is click on that block and drag the profile block where you need it to be. Once you’ve got it into the right position, you might want to go back and edit the colors and font sizes of your profile to format everything just right.
Finalizing your profile design
Go back to the edit profile section. The first thing that you should be aware of is that your profile block is sized by the length of your name, the font you pick for your name, and the size of the font. Your biography will wrap around when it reaches the right hand edge of your name. So if you need to tweak your profile block to fit into the empty space on your background image, this is the most important parameter.
I’m not going to jump into the best practices of how to design your profile page, but just remember to use a highly contrasting set of colors for your text. That includes your name, your biography, and the extra section, your headline, which can be found on the “biography” tab of the edit profile. What you’re looking for is a highly readable profile block on top of your background image, so it’s best that there is a large contrast between your font colors and the space where it appears on your background image.
Some final touches
If you’re so inclined, you can add some flair to your profile by tweaking a few sections of your profile. First, you can select different fonts for your name, headline, biography, and site list. One rule to live by here is that, usually less is better. I’d recommend using no more than two different fonts, one for your name and another for the rest of your profile.
Second, you can add some formatting to your biography. While a hyperlink function would have been great (hint hint), you can still do some basic bold, italics, underline, crossout, ordered lists and unordered lists.
Conclusion
I had a lot of fun putting together my About.me profile page. I’ve got a feeling that many other people will too. I can see About.Me becoming the new electronic business card for the social media future. Thanks to the About.Me team for putting together this simple, yet incredibly valuable service.
