Branding - Not the Cow Kind

I used to have a website. It wasn't a great website. It was a build-it-yourself website that kind of came along with having my email address at the time.

I was able to put up a sort of basic portfolio of things I'd worked on in the past and add in my resume. It wasn't exciting, but it was workable, and it gave me somewhere to refer people who asked about my background.

Then that went away, and aside from this blog (which, honestly, I'm not planning to refer people to if I'm looking for a job) and a couple of social-media-type sites, my web presence disappeared.

But I'm going to be speaking at a conference in a few weeks, and I really want to be able to point people to somewhere if they want to find me. So I'm trying to find a website building/hosting company that is quick and easy (and cheap) so I can put something together.

There are apparently a bunch of places that do this - at various rates of cheapness - so I've spent a few nights scrolling through lots of template designs searching for just the right look. But this is the kind of stuff that people pay companies thousands of dollars to develop and design. The all-important "brand identity" can make or break an online business.

Do I want to be slick and modern? Do I want to be cozy? Do I want to be artsy and laid back? Or do I just want to be Times New Roman on a white background?

How do I know? I mean... I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up - and I've had a LOT more time to consider that.