A New Website and Social Strategy For 2013

Hey, look! It’s a new mattselznick.com website!

I’ve been tinkering with this in those moments when client work is thin and my brain is a little too wrung out to write. As is my wont, I’ve pulled the tarp off before the paint is dry and all the screws are tight: some links might be temporarily broken, some content is still hidden, and for the moment, the shop is shuttered (but you can still buy my books, stories, and music elsewhere!)

I’ll get all that stuff squared away in the days to come, but I wanted to go live for the new year as, you know, one of those invented, arbitrary calendar-related symbolic gesture-thingies.

The site includes some fun “under the hood” stuff I’ve been meaning to play with in a substantive way — conditional tags for changing headlines and other small details based on the kind of page or content presented, and my first exploration of custom post types to create and display content that doesn’t quite fit the “blog” or “page” definition. This site was a great place to do a dry run on some of that stuff… I’m looking forward to using the same techniques on client sites and on a few personal projects I have in the works.

Why A New Site Now?

Frankly, I’ve been dissatisfied with my previous design for some time. The old site was meant to represent both my content creator and service provider sides and, I think, did so to the detriment of both. Now, my creative services company, MWS Media, has a site of its very own, and mattselznick.com is entirely dedicated to the things I make, think, and do as a creator. This is in keeping with my goal of eventually becoming more of a content creator and less of a services provider in the year to come.

The fact that the old site design tried to serve two sides of my creative and professional life also meant that it sent a bit of a mixed message, and did so in a way that was less than clear. I hope this new site proves cleaner and easier for folks to use… and that more people use it!

New Website and Social Strategy

I built this new site to coincide with a new approach to how I intend to curate and share content, not just how I present content I’ve created. This ties in with my new social media strategy.

I’ve been thinking a lot about all the wonderful, interesting, funny, thought-provoking, or just plain strange content I discover on the Web almost every day… and how often I use Facebook, Twitter, or, less often, Google Plus to share that content with my friends and fans. This is pretty much exactly the opposite of what I recommend to my clients: that social networks should be used as much as possible to funnel people back to one’s real hub and home on the Internet: one’s own personal website.

So, effective pretty much immediately, when I find something funny or cool, I’m going to share it here on this site… sometimes with comment, sometimes not. I’ll leave a little note on Facebook and Twitter about it, but that will be to bring people here to see whatever it is and, hopefully, to talk about it here, too.

As a secondary benefit, adopting this practice will mean that all that nifty stuff is linked from my own site, readily available to reference later if I need to, rather than digging around Facebook or Google Plus or what have you to find it.

Social Media Policy

I’d like you to take a look at my newly defined social media policy. It’s part of the new site, and something I don’t think I’ve ever bothered to publicly codify before. If you’re at all interested in connecting with me on one of the social networks, I hope you’ll give it a read.

Kick The Tires!

Even though I mentioned that there are still a few kinks to work out of this new website, I hope you’ll poke around and, if you find something not working the way you think it should, please contact me and let me know. And if you want to stay abreast of things in my creative and professional life, including new additions to this site, I do hope you’ll subscribe to my free e-mail newsletter if you haven’t already done so.

Thanks! Happy new year!

This is a post from Matthew Wayne Selznick. Thanks for reading A New Website and Social Strategy For 2013 -- please click through and comment, and share with everyone you know!