My personal goals and aims for a new year

Posted 11 January 2008, by Aaron

A window to the past

Hello…? … HELLO…? Cough, cough, please excuse me whilst I blow away some of these cobwebs and wipe the place down. Jeepers, it’s been a while hasn’t it?

First of all lets get the crap excuses out of the way: busy, Christmas, work, bla bla. And now the good excuse: I haven’t had a working Internet connection since 6th December. Good old BT have been buggering around with cables in the area and breaking a few thousand homes’ broadband connections. Mighty inconvenient for an Internet-addict such as myself, not to mention the web design projects which I’ve supposed to have been busy working on.

I won’t harp on about how utterly, utterly incompetent BT are, today is a day for rejoicing. At last I can log on to miLienzo.com again and make my first post of the year. And what a better way to start the year of blogging than to drop the bombshell that I’m going to stop! Well… not stop, but rather evolve.

I started this website almost a year ago and the reason was to network with other designers, learn from them, share what I was learning in college, and to try and establish myself in the industry. And I’ve done all that! I’ve learnt loads this past year and now I’ve got a great job, and I get enough freelance work to keep me out of trouble. The truth is miLienzo.com has lost a lot of its purpose so I need to give myself a new reason to commit to spending several hours a week running a blog.

I really want to push the freelance work this year so I have decided to build up my online portfolio and attach a blog to it. This will sit on myÂ aaronrussell.co.ukÂ domain (currently hosting my vastly out of date portfolio site) and I will aim to write more focused and relevant articles to my industry.

This idea is very much modelled on the success of fellow design-bloggers and country-folkÂ David AireyÂ andÂ Mark Boulton.Â I don’t want to blabber on too much about self promotion and personal branding and all that Internet jazz-talk, but I’m not sure miLienzo.com as a ‘brand’ can achieve what I want it to. It’s clear to me that this site has served a purpose and it’s time for me to realign my aims slightly.

So that’s that really. I still haven’t decided what I’m going to do with this site: whether to move all the content to my new site, or to just kill it and start from scratch, or even to try and flog it? I’d be interested to hear what you think I should do?

Over the next 4-6 weeks I’ll be pretty busy setting up the new site and creating a new design but I’ll continue to write updates on this site. I’m also busy working on another personal little project - a web app which I hope to launch this year and try and make a few bucks from. So there’s a few things in the pipeline keeping me occupied.

So 2008 looks like an exciting year. I hope you’ll stick around with me

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Tags:Blogging, Goals, Personal, Portfolio, Success

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5 fantastic comments

I think that networking with other designers could help in developing contacts that might become clients in the future. For this milienzo.com is good and you can keep it running, maybe with a stronger focus on the topics related to the work that you want to do. I might be ok even with less frequent updates…

If you rebuild the portfolio on your other site, maybe it’s better if you keep the navigation as simple as possible, with few distracting links: who could hire or contract you should get an idea of your best projects in few minutes. Just to make an example good for it synthesis: http://www.mutado.com

just my 2$
happy 2008!

Sorry to learn of the problems with BT. I’d actually considered switching from Virgin Media to BT when Virgin had some teething problems. Not nearly as bad as what you experienced however.

As for milienzo, I’d certainly keep it running, but put more effort into your personal named domain. Having a blog running through davidairey.com has certainly helped with branding, and if aaronrussell is what you want to promote, then I’d go for a blog on it too (maybe at aaronrussell.co.uk/blog, keeping the root as more of a gateway.

I’m glad everything’s now sorted with your connection, and I hope the new year was a great one.

Giovanni - I think you’re right - A portfolio site should be focussed on presenting the work and, well, making business, and perhaps the clutter of a blog can get in the way? That said, a blog can also drive a lot of traffic and is a great PR tool. I think there’s a balance to be struck. I like how the mutado site have approached it.

David - It’s interesting that both you and Giovanni suggest I keep running miLienzo.com. I must admit after a year building it up it I am reluctant just to let it go. Maybe I could run two - my domain as my primary ’serious’ blog, and miLienzo.com as it was always intended to be - my ‘canvas’ to blog about whatever I feel like.

Its good to know that you’re back. I’ll be looking for more of your posts!

Iena - Thanks. I know I’ve been a bit quiet these first two months but I hope to get in to the swing of things again soon.

My personal goals and aims for a new year

5 fantastic comments

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