When not all the slots were taken, I signed up for another mentoring session, this one with Scott Sheldon, who was going to do mentoring on building your electronic presence (briefly – a 15 minute session). When I sat down the first thing he said was “well, I know your music; I was the one who reviewed your CD for Sing Out.” And he pulled up his review, to remind himself what he’d said. And he also pulled up his own inbox, because people he knew had written to him about me, and he wanted to find out what they’d said (which included things like letting him know they’d gone to see me in concert, or encouraging him to book me for a series he’s involved with). So that was a promising start. We then took a quick look at what comes up when you do a google search on my name. Which does – thanks to an unusual name – turn up the relevant stuff about me. And turns up my music stuff long before any of my academic stuff comes up, at least when you search under Beth. We then took a list at my webpage, which I know needs some changing, so it was useful to look at it through his eyes. First, he suggested some meta tags – things that electronic entities (like search engines) will pull up but that others won’t see. And then we looked at what you first see when you get to my webpage. Which isn’t much. On the plus side, it’s layed out logically, with easy ways to get to the information you might want (something that came up in the “building your team” workshop session this afternoon as well) clearly and without too many clicks. But when you start on my home page all you get is my picture. His suggestion was to have my music calendar immediately there, and also a link to where people can buy music. And some photos, and maybe even video right on that front page (although further down). A website he suggested as a model was the We’re About 9 website, which I’ve certainly see before, since they’re some of my favorite musicians – and people. He also suggested that I make sure that I have good quality videos easily available on youtube. The trick will be for me to figure out how best to get my website into a form that will work for me. I don’t have the skills to make it myself, so I either need to figure out if – even if only temporarily – I can do a better job with the template from Hostbaby than I’ve previously done or if I need to jump straight to having someone else design the webpage. Which I probably do need to do eventually anyway. But even then I’ll need to make sure that however it is set up, it’s in a way that I can easily stay on top of the changes and updates I want to make with the level of knowledge I have about websites. We also talked a bit about descriptors and taglines but I’ll save that for another post, since I’ve been working on that from many different angles, and still haven’t quite figured out where I’m going. So I’ll try to pull all those thoughts together into one blog post at some point.