About.me

AOL's online profile service, About.me (free), is practically the old man of personal Webpage sites, having launched way back in 2009. (AOL scooped it up in 2010.) The About.me homepage welcomes you with a display at the bottom of featured landing pages, so you can get an idea of what an About.me page will look like. The emphasis, as with Flavors.me (Free, 4.5 stars), is on a big photo as the background with accompanying links. About.me delivers big on that score, and entirely for free. Sadly it lacks some of the landing page features that would make it the leader while stressing unneeded social components.

Getting Started
Once you create an account (using your e-mail address, password, and picking an About.me URL), future sign-ins can be done via Facebook or Twitter. The About.me interface takes all the pain out of creating a site; you can easily upload a background image, enter your name, a "headline," and bio, and add links to just about any social/sharing/blogging service in the world, including Facebook profiles, Facebook Pages, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogger, Google+, Wordpress, TypePad, Foursquare, Flicker, YouTube, Vimedo, Instagram, and others. All these links and data go in a text box that you can then position where you want on the background, relative to the most important part of the image. That's it?there's no extra special layouts to be had. As you resize the browser window the background will smartly resize as much as it can to maintain your layout.

Going Mobile
An About.me page looks good on a smartphone, where the page is reformatted to have the background graphic at the top and the text box info underneath. You can sign in and access features like stats while mobile, but can't edit the page. About.me has released an iPhone app that will let you change some of the text info (your headline and bio) but not all. The app description claims you can set a background image for mobile-only views, but I couldn't find it.

There's an option to activate an About.me email address for yourself, which is a nice feature if you want to keep your real email off the landing page to prevent spam. The service also excels at providing suggestions to get more visitors to your landing page, with suggestions on sharing the URL via social networks, links in other sites, and it has a form for submitting the URL (any URL, actually) to Bing and Google.

Weak Social
Where About.me loses me is its desire to be a low-rent social network. Stressed throughout the interface is the ability to find other users of the service and mark them as favorites. While I admit it might be nice if a Facebook profile page looked this good (there's a reason people hate the Timeline), I don't really want to find that small percentage of my friends and associates also have a landing page...because I already know them on the real social networks. Favoriting is a major facet of the iPhone app, which also has a "locate" feature so you can find people nearby with an About.me landing page.

Extras
There's no paid version of About.me, but it does a few offer "extras," in addition to the email address. It sells business cards for the cost of shipping ($5.50) from Moo.com that depict your landing page background image on the front and contact details on the back. There's a QR code to send people with smartphones directly to your page. Stats are just a click away, so you can see how many visitors you get (although not where they came from).

Sorely lacking is the ability to support a domain name of your choosing. It's a major quibble when projecting yourself out there is important and a domain name feature helps.

What's It All About?
What About.me lacks in paid features it more than makes up for with a perfect blend of simplicity and style. A few more bells and whistles for power-users would put it at the top of the landing page heap. As it is, however, Flavors is the clear Editors' Choice for a personal Web page.

More Web Publishing Reviews:
??? Zerply
??? About.me
??? Skrawlr
??? Jux
??? Re.vu
?? more

orange juice photos doomsday clock nate robinson sharia law sharia law new hampshire primary results