In this workshop, you will write your web-friendly professional bio, create your "digital business card" using Carrd, and link your scholarly IDs and social media.
Platforms like Carrd are sometimes called "link in bio" tools and have hugely increased in popularity on Instagram and TikTok. Linkpop, a link in bio tool developed by e-commerce platform Shopify, suggested the following:
Our use case isn't precisely the same, but we are still building reputation and sharing further information outside of the simple links available on ORCiD, Google Scholar, etc. Hopefully you will have already created your Carrd account, but if you have not, please visit https://carrd.co/signup to do so. Make sure you remember the email and password you use and visit your email inbox to verify your account.
Once your account has been verified, visit https://carrd.co/pro to upgrade to the "Pro Standard" plan and wait for one of the workshop instructors to facilitate the upgrade. When you receive your confirmation email from Carrd, please forward it to one of your workshop instructors with your full name as it is given in Banner and your 95# and attach a PDF receipt by following the instructions from Carrd's documentation.
Writing for the web requires brevity, clarity, and a keen understanding of and focus on one's audience. Biography writing can be awkward at the best of times with its uncertain pronouns and shades of self-aggrandizement. Web biographies, therefore, can easily become hot trash unreadable and devoid of usable information -- and this is worse in scholarly environments with our tendencies toward disciplinary jargon and turning CVs into prose. It's much easier to list where we've been and what degrees we have than to summarize who we are and what we stand for, but it can be done and there are some great tips that we've tracked down to help you get to a first draft you're happy to share with others. It's a work in progress.
At the time of writing, Carrd has 131 themes to select from (50 for Pro users only) and a fully-functional What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor to design your own theme.
We will be using the theme linked on this demo site. You can activate this theme by selecting "Choose a Starting Point," navigating to the "Profile" category and scrolling six rows down and clicking "Select" on the appropriate theme. There is a young woman whose photo is in a circle, with her name, Kara Smith, in large letters, to the right of her photograph.
Your initial view will feature a number of placeholders. When you hover over each element, its name and a dotted border in bright aqua will appear. In the screenshot, I am prepared to edit the main header, Kara's name.
Please edit the text to reflect your name and preferred title.
Let's add our photo next. When you click into the circle, you will bring up a menu on the left side of your screen. Upload your profile photo here and make sure to complete your alt text. "Headshot of Kara Smith" is generally appropriate.
Note the tabs along the top of this menu: the first tab will change depending on the element you're editing, but the other three stay the same. The paintbrush controls the look-and-feel of the element, allowing you to change colors, shapes, fonts, sizes, padding, and margins. The play button controls animation, allowing you to change how an element loads on the page and when you hover over it. The gear icon is largely unusable on the Pro Standard plan, but on Pro Plus, you're able to customize some CSS.
At the bottom of your menu, you'll have three additional buttons: duplicate, delete, and "Done." Duplicating an element will create a clone immediately underneath the currently selected element; you will move to the menu for the duplicate immediately. If you click the trash can, you will delete the currently selected element. Clicking "Done" will close the menu. If you delete an element in error, change something to an unsightly color, or otherwise make a mistake, that's okay! You're one click away from a fix: you always have access to the top-most menu with undo and redo buttons available.
This theme doesn't have a spot for our short biography, so let's add it in. Click on your title and duplicate it. To make this text look a bit less like a header, change the following settings:
Then, click the "A" tab at the top to paste your biography into this text box.
A background will make our profile a bit more interesting. Click anywhere on the background or click the 3 lines in the upper right corner of the primary menu and select "Background" from the resulting dropdown.
The theme comes with a Slideshow-style background enabled. This animated style will slowly fade in and out images of your choice; you can control this animation, its speed, and the color of any transparency. You may change your background to a single image, a single color, a gradient, or a video. Make sure you only use content you own or to which you are certain of the rights; I recommend Unsplash.
Now it's time for the fiddly bit: selecting, adding, and customizing your selected profiles. Open them in new tabs or put their URLs in a document where you can easily copy and paste them. This element type is known as "Icons" on Carrd and cannot show a label. If you want to include text with your icon, you'll want to use the "Button" element instead (see Kate's and Franny's sites for examples).
On Carrd, click into the "Icons" element and then the GitHub item in the menu. Select the icon you would like to use from the dropdown menu. There are several categories to choose from: symbols, navigation, and brands. In this workshop, you will only need to select from symbols and brands, but you can see navigation in use on Franny's site. If the symbol you need isn't available, consider using a link with a Unicode emoji or symbols. Paste the URL for your profile / account / document and move on to the next.
Who's ready to talk color? That mint green is nice, but I always like to put my personal stamp on things. I like the Material Design Color Tool, which has a built-in Accessibility Tool. You can select any of the colors on the Palette (scroll for colors that aren't red, pink, and purple) and it will give you a lighter and darker shade and let you know whether white or black text will have sufficient contrast on that color, the lighter shade, and/or the darker shade. This is a great way to get a darker color for the icon and a lighter color for the background.
To change the colors of all your icons at the same time, don't change them when the diamond tab is selected. Make sure the paintbrush tab is active before changing your icon colors. There are three styles of icons: transparent, solid background, and outline. Depending on which style you select, you will have two to three colors you need to select: the background/outline, the icon color, and the hover color.
If you have a background or an outline, you can choose from eight different shapes, including stars, squares, and triangles. You may also choose to change the animation that occurs when someone hovers over your icon. Note that hover animations only occur on desktop; anyone on a touchscreen won't experience those interactions.
And now... it's time to publish! But you have a few more hoops to jump through before your Carrd is live on the web. First, you need to title your site. This could be your first and last name, this could be your first and last name plus your title, this could be something else entirely. (Do you have a mononym? That's so cool.) Then, we need a description. This is the blurb that shows up on Google when "they" search your name.
Finally, you're given the opportunity to select a Carrd subdomain (youpick.carrd.co) or to publish to a custom domain. What this means is that you could create a subdomain (for instance, profile.your-reclaim-domain.com) that would lead to your Carrd site. If we have time and this is of interest, we can talk about this in the workshop, but if not, there are instructions on Carrd about how to create the necessary records and on Reclaim about how to create a subdomain.
1501 Kincaid Street
Eugene, OR 97403
P: 541-346-3053
F: 541-346-3485