My undying love for personal sites

I've always had a thing for personal websites/landing pages. It's been a really long time since I started my first one, which was made using Google Pages. I dug up my old emails to figure out that it's been almost nine years since I launched that! I remember I was the first one among my friends or family to have such a site online, and it made quite a stir. Soon quite a few of them started to make their own. After the folks at mountain view discontinued Pages (like many other services they used to offer), I switched to Weebly. But by then, social media sites had already become quite popular, and your Myspace, Hi5 or (a bit later but more importantly) Facebook profile became the most common address to hand out to others.

I was into these platforms from the early stages, being quite active and growing my friends list in Hi5, Orkut and Facebook. Quite a while later I was introduced to LinkedIn and fell in love! Also, I was part of the beta group for trying out Google+ before it went public, not to mention I've been quite engaged with the photography community of G+ since then.

And all the while, my personal page was left abandoned. But the thing is, I always felt a personal website is something of immense importance to promote one's identity. But the context from nine years ago have changed a lot. I remember my old site, in which I put a ton of information about me, including my full and updated profile. I also used to upload my photos into my site. But now the LinkedIn profile acts as a much better and more important place to keep my profile updated. Photography based platforms like G+ and Flickr connects you to thousands of others across the world. My writing has now expanded into three blogs, and now in LinkedIn too. So now, instead of a full blown website containing all info about me, a landing site, nowadays, is more relevant, that would lead the audience into the many other tools I use to express myself. With that in mind, a few years ago I made my own about.me page. Honestly, it served my purpose perfectly, and did a lot more. But recently they've updated their service to make it much more simpler and minimalistic. Which is cool and all, but unfortunately a little too restricting for my choice. Moreover, I was looking to have my own domain for my site, which would make it much more professional. But about.me requires a premium account to do that.

So, to take matters into my own hands, I made my own, simple landing site using good ol' blogger. It's a dead simple one-pager with a brief summary, and links to my Twitter, LinkedIn and G+ profiles as well as my blog. Also, I am now on my own domain, which is something that I've wanted for so long. So give it a look, it takes a blink! And if you have any suggestions, please let me know!

www.asifulhaq.com