Today I am launching my website, joegillespie.golf and I want to share my purpose for doing so.
There are three reasons I decided to build and launch a personal website:
To help market myself to potential employers and clients
To showcase skills that can't be seen easily on my resume
To have a single location to archive some of my best work and favorite projects.
Marketing Myself
If you're on this site, you're probably aware that I will be losing my job at NBC Sports Group in early 2023. I don't take the opportunity to reflect on my achievements and my career all that often, but as I updated my resume, I realized just how much I have to be proud of.
I want to share that information with people and organizations that I'm interested in working with and I want it to be easily accessible. I want them to be able to feel like they know me, because, I believe, people that know me want to work with me; and I have a long list of current and former colleagues, partners, and clients who would back up that idea.
Showcasing Skills
There is a lot of overlap between my resume and this site, but you'll find a few things here, that aren't stated so explicitly in my resume. For instance, in the SKILLS section of my resume, I identify some important, and very relevant, soft skills. The savvy reader of my resume would pick up on the themes of developing partnerships and client relationships, team leadership, and innovation and development that run through the projects I worked on, but these skills are so important to understanding all that I bring to the table, and it felt important I wanted to highlight and comment on them in a way that a resume just doesn't allow you to.
I also wanted to showcase other skills that I have that I don't take the opportunity to educate people about because they're not what I would consider my "core skillset." Design is a big one that falls into this bucket. I work a lot in After Effects, Photoshop, and Illustrator to create beautifully-designed still and motion graphics. I'm fascinated by animation.
Also, this website itself. When I say "I Built This," the title of this blog entry, I mean that I built this website. I don't consider myself a "web designer" but I know the importance of good design in a website, and I've had a few opportunities to design sites. In 2019, I placed 2nd out of over 200 entries in an internal web design contest at GOLF Channel. We were tasked with building a template for a site designed specifically to tailor to the needs of a golf course using specific tools provided by GolfNow.
Having a Digital Portfolio
Having a digital portfolio of my work is something I should have done a long time ago, but there were always other priorities.
Though the portfolio is randomized and not in any sort of chronological order, what you'll see in it is growth over time. All of the video is content that I produced, and in some cases edited and/or designed graphics for. Some of the content was intended solely for distribution on TV, and some of it, specifically created to be digital social content.
I hope that you enjoy watching some of the work that I've done. Check back often as I intend to continue adding more content as I can.
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