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For me this summer was the time to build one. Although I had one of the first personal horn websites out there — 1998! — it was always part of my Horn Articles Online site and was very dated. It was time to go big!
Before getting to the specifics, building the new personal website was a great thought process in itself. Even though it is not an easy task, very likely the results will be an encouragement to you, and will bring new focus to your goals for the coming year.
My personal site is at johnericsonhorn.com The site is WordPress, with a number of pages of content and a small blog. Which leads to three main topics for readers.
The first topic is that of the choice of platform. I chose WordPress as I’m very familiar with it (Horn Matters is WordPress), but I know it intimidates some people. Really, you have many options for the actual platform, ask around and see what others say. To be honest the hardest single task in WordPress is finding a template that you like, after that it is not much harder than typing a series of documents.
Second topic is that of pages. The “pages” are the content accessed from the ribbon across the top. For me this was the most interesting part of the process, dividing the content and building those areas. To see that I had more than a dozen publications, to see the series of videos ready to play under the Recordings tab, it was time to lay it out in this way. Also, I would highlight the Teaching tab, I had never laid it out like this and I hope former, current, and future students see my thinking.
Final topic is the small blog. While Horn Matters is based on blog content by myself and Bruce Hembd, as I was also editing older content in Horn Matters I could see a number of articles that I thought were interesting with good content, but low traffic. So I have moved over a dozen older articles of this personal blog content to the small blog, check it out for I think some good reading and insights into my teaching and playing.
Also, I should mention you don’t need to have a blog as part of your site. While it is a feature of many WordPress templates, some don’t require you to have one, such as the one I chose for my Horn Notes Edition website.
Back to the original topic to close, is it time for you to build a personal website? It is surprising how many people of the horn world don’t have one at all. Yes it is time! Especially this slow summer of 2021, you should get this element of your online profile set now rather than later.
