Develop Your Idea
For my first website, I want it to be a website that successfully showcases my poetry skills and increases engagement and hopefully a collection of users who want to purchase a future collection of my poems.
My collection of poems I intend to showcase have themes of intimacy, lust, longing or dark/horror themes through a critique of domestic violence and climate change respectively. I am drawn to colors and aesthetics that create calm and ease, but I also worry this might clash with the intensity of these themes and potentially placate their tone.Discovery and Research
An important lesson I've learned from this course that really pushes my view on how to present content is “show, not tell.” Poetry is a challenging product to sell, as it is a medium that many in my generation simply do not connect with on a daily basis, and it's often associated with classism and perspective from dead people. Someone who has succeeded in becoming a worldwide success and successfully reached younger and mature audiences is poet Rupi Kaur. Her team has really set the gold standard for how to grab attention via social media and utilized trendy aesthetics associated with serenity to captivate an engaged audience.
Rupi Kaur wrote a poetry collection for a college course and she has stated she ended up self publishing it in 2015, because her professor said nobody buys poetry anymore, but she felt she had “created a body of work that should be read cover to cover”.
Via her Instagram account, she began publishing all kinds of original poetry, almost daily entries tackling various political issues as well as intimate subjects like mental health and living as a woman in the modern world. She would post her poetry as images with her name attached and this simple promotion was easy to engage with with likes, reposts/stories (free promo) and comments. Her work resonated and spread like wildfire, which led to 120k followers and 15,000 copies sold in the first year. Clearly, emphasizing the promotion of her work through centering her words and stanzas, alongside sometimes her own face and photos of her life, created a persona that people connected and looked up to.
Her website now represents the powerhouse she has established herself as, sectioned into “books”, “world tours” (book tour updates), an about me page and various “shop” tabs and subscription inceptives (shop for books, clothes, accessories, writers block tips and tricks, collabs, etc).
As I reflect on my rookie stage, I know that this current website does not represent my needs for the portfolio website, but perhaps her original approach on instagram can be my inspiration and approach for creating likability and building my own brand.
Target Your Audience
I want my website to really resonate with people my age. How to do that I think comes down to successfully executing a clear and exciting aesthetic visual for the website alongside quality poetic content.
I want to attract the young people who get giddy inside when they see a gorgeous and ornate book cover, and who find themselves always seeking escapism through art.
Inspiration & Concept
Wireframes
