Hey hey, hey, check out the new digs!

As you can see, I’ve decided to step out from behind my business name, Made You Look Online, and move my website and personal “brand identity” over here to erinwhalen.com.

And my fabulous designer, Tzaddi Gordon, and I totally revamped the look of the site in the process!

Why would I do such a thing – especially when my current website at madeyoulookonline.net was less than a year old, and I still loved it?

Here are the 3 main reasons why I knew I had to claim my name & update my look of my site…

1. People want to do business with Erin Whalen, not Made You Look

Over the course of the past year, I’ve come to realize that people don’t visit my website to see what “Made You Look” has written recently.

They don’t want Made You Look to write their website copy or email campaigns — or teach them how to write their own copy more effectively.

They want ME to do these things.

Erin Whalen.

That’s the name that comes to mind when they think, “Who should I ask about writing online copy?”

(You know how many people find my site by googling “Erin Whalen” as compared to “Made You Look”? It’s silly.)

And so, even though it’s kind of freaking me out to put myself front and centre in my own business like this, I’ve realized I should give people more of what they’re looking for – and, um, it appears that would be ME.

OMG, it feels so weird and braggy to say that. I want to take a shower now.

2. My last website was “cute.” I am not.

As a reminder, this is the homepage of my last site looked like:

(Bye-bye dancing animals. Sob!)

Man… I loved this site. I loved the animals with their goofy eyes and how the “THAT’S AWESOME!” and “OMG I LOVE IT SO MUCH!” speech bubbles would jump in size every time you moused over them.

I loved the dancing “Let’s Dance!” monkey and the orange circles that turned navy when you moused over them:

 

SO FREAKIN’ ADORABLE.

But just because I loved it, that doesn’t mean it was ME.

This website is super cute, right? But the truth is, “cute” isn’t a word that’s often applied to me.

I was never the kind of little girl who played with dolls much or doted on adorable stuffies. In fact, the only game I remember ever playing with my Barbie dolls was “Haunted Horror House,” in which the dolls were murdered one by one in the most imaginative ways I could think of.

(Um, not to scare you off or anything.)

So while I adored the site, over time I became increasingly aware that it didn’t quite “fit” my personality.

After all, I’m far more likely at any given moment to be reading some crazy high-concept sci-fi novel or acting out the best scenes from the latest Game of Thrones episode (moar ice zombies!!!) with my sons and a full armory of toy swords than I ever am to be thinking of adorable animals.

(Sorry, cats of the Internet.)

So for my next website, I knew I wanted a style that felt more authentically me.

And that new website came sooner than expected because…

3. It was time to kick the professionalism up a notch or ten

When Tzaddi and I developed on my last website, I wasn’t 100% sure what I wanted its main purpose to be, other than to hopefully inform, entertain, and inspire people – and above all, make them smile.

My client roster was pretty much booked full to the end of the year, so I wasn’t actively seeking any new work (in fact, I was turning new client requests away).

I was mentally psyching myself up to create WORDPLAY, the six-week online webinar series I ran last fall – but all the content was still just ideas banging around in my head and I wasn’t anywhere close to promoting it yet.

So in terms of my website design, I just felt like playing – and as you can see, the result was a pretty darned playful website.

However, with the launch of WORDPOWER, the new, self-directed online writing program I’m releasing this fall, I knew it was time to get legit.

I am crazy excited about how valuable this program is going to be (it’s going to teach you how to write EVERY SINGLE PIECE OF ONLINE COPY YOU COULD POSSIBLY NEED – and you get lifetime access to my huge library of online writing tools and resources!) – but in order to make sure it gets out to as wide an audience as possible, I knew I needed to present a more credible face to the world.

Dancing animals make ME giggle, but not all potential clients or promotion partners can see how that translates into money in their pockets, you know?

And so it was time for me to present myself in a more professional way – while still remaining true to my authentic personality.

(I think Tzaddi and I did a good job… you?)

So those are the three main reasons why I overhauled my site and transferred it to erinwhalen.com. It was a valuable exercise in branding (something I’d never really thought a whole heck of a lot about) and really hammered home how important it is to have a website that does a great job of conveying your personality AND does the best possible job of giving people what they want.

I hope you found it helpful!

If you have any comments you’d like to share about the new design, please post them below. I’d love to hear your thoughts!