Creating a Personal Website

Rather than making your landing page a resource for your contacts, consider linking to your personal website. This will give you greater flexibility and control over your design and organization of your topics... as well as cleaning up your landing page.

I have found Weebly to be an intuitive, easy-to-use website host. They offer a free version which may be sufficient for your needs, or you can pay for extra features. There are lots of very professional templates to choose from, and it's easy to customize them with your own pictures.

You can see my "writer" website at http://karlacook.weebly.com/. The free version mandates using "weebly" in your URL, but if you go with the "pro" version you can choose your own URL (depending on availability).

Adding Social Media Icon Buttons

The first thing you want to do is find a set of social media icons that you like. You can just Google "free social media icons" to find all kinds of sets. I went with the ones at http://www.twelveskip.com/resources/icons/1091/boxxed-flat-social-media-icons because they were clean, simple, available in various sizes, plus she didn't require a link back to use them.

Next, download the set to your computer and unzip the file. Mostly likely you won't use every icon in the set. (That would be way overkill!) I wanted to link to Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter so those are the icons I chose to work with.

Now you're ready to watch the tutorial at http://www.diydesignfanatic.com/2013/08/how-to-add-social-media-buttons-to-your.html. She shows how to put the icons on the side-bar of your blog, but it's the same idea for putting them at the bottom of your first post. You just wouldn't need to create a separate post to remain unpublished.