Making decisions regarding my new website branding is the first milestone in The Ostrich website project roadmap. This post is a project progress report, summarizing the completion of the milestone.

The outcomes, as apparent if you’re reading this on my blog, are:

1. I decided to move away from the old itamaro.com branding.
2. The new site name is The Ostrich.
3. New site tagline: Break; Build; Repeat;.
4. Domain for new site: ostricher.com. Being also my last name, I already own it. So, hurray!
5. Social network branded account / profiles / pages created:
   1. Facebook page “The Ostrich” with address Ostrich.IO (The.Ostrich wasn’t available..).
   2. Google+ page “The Ostrich” with address Ostricher.IO + Google+ community The Ostrich (I’m not sure what’s the difference though).
   3. Twitter account “The Ostrich” with handle @OstricherIO.
   4. Quora blog at theostrich.quora.com (not sure what I’ll do with it).
   5. Tumblr account at ostricherio.tumblr.com (not sure what I’ll do with it).
   6. Reddit account as ostrichio (yet again, not sure what I’ll do with it).
   7. Pinterest account as ostrichio (…again…).
   8. StumbleUpon account as ostrichio (..guess what..).
   9. GitHub organization at github.com/theostrichio (though I’m not sure how to use it along my personal account..).

There isn’t much to expand actually.

I decided to move away from the existing itamaro.com branding mostly to differentiate between my personal identity and the site.

I had to make many compromises after deciding on The Ostrich name, as you can see in the summary. All the natural choices for domains and various social account names were unavailable. This made me briefly rethink my decision, and consider a variation on the name. Maybe some “The <insert adjective here> Ostrich”. I moved away from that thought after 1 day or so, since “The Ostrich” is fun and catchy. I’ll have to live with the compromises.

It is also apparent that I signed up for plenty of social platforms, while having no idea what to do with them. To be honest, I don’t quite understand the essence of most…

A GitHub organization seemed appropriate, due to the extent that I cover software development.

I came up with the tagline quite randomly. I guess it’s not completely original, but if I “borrowed” it from somewhere, I am not aware of that. It felt right for my “corner on the Internet”. A common theme for many of my side projects is taking something that I do, “breaking” it by questioning my underlying assumptions, “building” it from scratch, and “repeating” the cycle all over with something else.

If you have questions about my branding decisions, tips on how to effectively use the various social accounts, or more social platforms that I missed – I’d like to hear from you via the comments!