My friend Cheryl and I were just talking about an eternal challenge: crafting a “personal website” that does justice to an individual’s whole scope of interests, passions and abilities.  She asked for my help setting up a custom WordPress website, and we needed to find some design cues, a roadmap toward bringing her significant documentary filmmaking, teaching, and flat-out innovative thinking about television and social media under one umbrella.

Those things we need we needed to get in–but what about her sizeable extracurricular interests, such as mining photographic gold out of discarded street finds?

We immediately faced a dangerous trap: people are complex human beings. We have a lot of disparate interests.

Disparate interests do not a coherent brand make.

And so we come the crux of the matter when creating a personal website.

The trick is to settle on a coherent idea, a motif, and then let that guide you toward a web presence.

This may force some difficult choices. I told Cheryl that there are lots of things I’m interested in that don’t make the cut at Jellybean Boom: films about funerals, for instance, or my joy at drinking Clover-brewed iced coffee at my local Starbucks (shhh, don’t tell anyone).

The great joy in web publishing is being able to express yourself freely, let your freak flag fly, as it were.

But the same creative impulse that has given rise to thousands of created and abandoned Tumblrs holds out a cautionary tale for building a personal brand: think carefully about limiting the sphere of that expression, lest your website be similarly glanced at and abandoned.

To build a personal brand that thrives on the web, you need to define yourself, even if its painful. What’s your motto or mantra? I was just reading about the candy mogul Dylan Lauren in Vogue–hers is “Pure Imagination” from Willy Wonka. I like the brevity and simplicity of that, and it certainly supports her underlying brand identity.

For others, the right brand might be drawn from a design cue or era, films of the French New Wave or Steampunk.

Don’t worry that you are locking yourself in, just go through the exercise. All great brands need a strong central ideas.

If you’re just getting your feet wet, About.me and Flavors.me are two good solutions for getting you a landing page that pulls together all the threads you might have out there on the web, from Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and LinkedIn for example.

Some other article I’ve written about personal branding:

New Year, New You: Branding Strategies for Independents and Nonprofits

5 Easy Way to Get Your Online and Social Media Identities on the Same Page