The name for this website was always going to be a crucial part of its branding.
Furthermore, I couldn’t start building the site until I had decided on a name because I needed to purchase the url web address that expressed that name.
But I was never going to call the website that housed it www.masteroftransdisciplinaryapplication.com.
It would have been ridiculous to call the site that!
Way too wordy and dull.
I guess I could have called it mtaportfolio.com.
That certainly sounds better and is more succinct.
But it doesn’t really express what the site is about.
I needed a name that expressed the nature of my self-directed studies without calling it a Master of Transdisciplinary Application.
A name that needed to be similar but separate.
Thinking about the bigger picture
The working name I came up with was…
My Big Picture Education a.k.a. mybigpicture.education
Being a transdisciplinary master’s degree that goes above and beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries, my postgraduate studies are very much focused on big picture thinking.
Big picture thinking refers to a thinking strategy that focuses on the entirety of a concept or idea instead of on each individual detail. People who use big picture thinking can often see the long-term possibilities of a plan and the overall potential for success.
What is the big picture?, Indeed.com
Utilising the big picture phrase was also a part of a much bigger branding plan I had for my overall career brand.
Originally, I had planned to use the big picture name for my personal brand, my life coaching brand and the education platform offshoot of this site.
Then I experimented with differentiating the different sub-brands of my career brand by dropping the big picture phrase from them and giving them mostly distinct names.
This is also when the phrase renaissance found its way into my branding.
Renaissance referring to concept of being a renaissance man or person…
A cultured man of the Renaissance who was knowledgeable, educated, or proficient in a wide range of fields. A present-day man who has acquired profound knowledge or proficiency in more than one field.
Dictionary.com
I very much consider myself a renaissance man.
In addition to my personal website being called renaissancepete.com, I did consider calling my MTA site myrenaissanceeducation.com.
But I decided against it when I felt it would be smarter to distinguish all my sites with their own brand identities.
This also is when I decided to call my MTA Portfolio website…
MTA Education a.k.a. mta.education.
I had been researching what urls are available and had discovered that you could use all sorts of TDLs (Top Level Domains), that’s the name or set of letters that comes after the dot in a web address.
It’s actually also how I hit on the name for my life coaching business as Not Your Average Life Coach when I found the .coach TDL, I could create a shortened url as notyouraveragelife.coach.
Stylistically, it was also very clean and quirky.
Likewise, when I discovered the .education TDL, I just knew I had to use it for the name of my MTA site.
Then I hit on mta.education for the name.
While I liked how short the name was, I still wanted to find a name that more thoroughly encapsulated the essence of what I was doing with my self-directed MTA.
But mta.education would do until I came up with something better.
Be creative to produce something unique
I think I very wisely decided against using the big picture or renaissance phrase for my overall career brand.
While the big picture philosophy and being a renaissance man are both very much central to me as a person and how I go about operating in the world, they’re already pre-established phrases and brands.
I needed to come up with my own original branding that was unique to me and to my creative thinking.
Increasingly, I was looking at the design of this website and its name from a marketing perspective.
The reason why I was building my own master’s degree and a website to house it was so I could market my expertise to potential employers, collaborators and clients.
The breakthrough came when I was designing my personal website, a site I eventually came to call Pete Be Creative a.k.a. petebecreative.com.
I was working on my personal website, my life coaching website and this website all at the same time throughout 2019, so they all rubbed off on each other.
As I explained in the component page detailing the creation of my life coaching website…
“I wanted names that would sum up each brand and that would work as clear descriptions about me on the main page of PeteBeCreative.com.”
I built a better name
mta.edcuation didn’t sum up the essence of my self-directed master’s degree.
I wanted something a bit snappier, quirkier and immediately clear to understand.
Something that was a simple statement.
A statement that would work on its own and alongside the other brands present on my personal website.
So I started conceptualizing…
Ibuiltmyownmasters.com
Ibuiltmyownmastersdegree.com
Ibuiltmyownmastersdegree.education
Ibuiltmyownmasters.education
I really liked ibuiltmyownmasters.education but I was concerned with there being confusion over whether it was ‘master’ or ‘masters’ (although really its ‘master’s’) and people typing the url in wrong and not finding the site.
Not that most people do type in urls!
Most use search engines.
But it still didn’t sit right with me.
Then I thought about replacing ‘masters’ with ‘postgraduate’
Ibuiltmyownpostgraduate.education
That worked.
Although it was a bit long.
And then I thought, why not just…
Ibuiltmyown.education
Perfect.
It’s a simple, descriptive, catchy and proactive statement of what I’ve done with my postgraduate studies.
It’s also a name that allowed me to fully separate my MTA Portfolio into its own distinct brand and to make the construction of its website a project in its own right.
This is why the building of ibuiltmyown.education is now component 2 of the final project for my Education Innovation concentration.
A final project that is slightly confusingly called I Built My Own Education.
So ibuiltmyown.education is both a product of my MTA Portfolio and the website that encapsulates it!
But, at least, my MTA website now has as a unique name all its own.
The name doesn’t sum up the focus of my studies as being a transdisciplinary master’s degree in Sustainable Globalisation and Creative Enterprise.
But ibuiltmyown.education does sum up the philosophy behind my postgraduate studies and that is so much more important.