When I was a junior in high school, I was called to the office quite unceremoniously. It was a little strange for me because, until that point, I had not ever been called to the office for anything bad. (Until that point.)

When I got to the office I told them that I was Corey Smith. They looked at me and said, “You’re not Corey Smith.”

I asked them if they had a mirror for me to check.

Come to find out there was another Corey Smith in my high school that was about ready to be suspended and so they were going to give me a “what-for” when I got to the office. I think they were disappointed they couldn’t.

Since I was born in 1974, there have been another 151,555 baby boys and 7,323 baby girls that have been born with the name of Corey in the United States. You add the surname of Smith to that mix and I have a reasonably common name.

Being identifiable as the only Corey Smith that you should care about has been a challenge for me. You couple that with the popularity of a couple of key people that have my name including the person that owns my domain name of coreysmith.com you can imagine it’s a bit difficult to get found at the top of the search engines if you are looking for Corey Smith the businessman from Meridian, Idaho instead of Corey Smith the musician, Corey Smith the accountant, Corey Smith the football player (who died in a boating accident) or Corey Smith the other football player (who is still alive).

Since I found my way to the web about six years ago, I’ve worked hard to develop my online presence to be meaningful. I wanted to make sure that if you do a Google search for “Corey Smith” that I have at least one link on the first page of results that point people to me. As domain names are a part of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) mix, it’s a challenge since I don’t own my own dot com. (Too bad I didn’t pick it up in 1997 when I was thinking about it.)

One of the interesting challenges that I face is the quantity of fan email I get because I’m so good at performing music. I get at least one request per week from people asking me to come give them a private performance.

I’m not sure there is anything in my bio or blog that indicates I am any good at singing. I’m certainly not any good at playing the guitar. Yet, I get confused with “him” so often. Maybe my new website with more pictures of “me” will “help.” (How about that for too many “quotes?”)

As of the writing of this post, I did a search on Google for “Corey Smith” and found that you could find me in 4 of the 10 listings. The other guy (I won’t name his name because I won’t want him to get credit) is listed 6 times. Plus he has images and is in the sidebar on Google's listing page. I feel sorry for every other Corey Smith out there.

So, I’m the real Corey Smith. I’m the one you’ll want to talk to. Unless I’m not. Then you’ll want to look for the other one (or the others).

Two years ago this week, I started this new blog. I came up with a design that I was very happy with but then a few months later I realized that it needed a little upgrade because it quickly became my personal branding website and not only my blog.

Over the course of those two years, I have made a few tweaks here and there and have been pretty happy with the result. I've enjoyed the design but I finally figured it was time for an overhaul.

Not only is my website an opportunity for me to write new content but it's also a bit of a test bed for doing new things with our company's web design capabilities.

For example, my old blog was the first mobile responsive design that we put together. Well, I did it but now my company builds most of our sites with mobile responsive design. My first blog post on the subject was Mobile Web Requires Accomodations. I wrote that shortly after I put in the responsive upgrade to my blog in September of 2011. The purpose of that post was to point out how responsive web design works. Of course, the images in that post are out of date now so I might have to write a follow up to it.

I wanted to create a new website that matches the trends that we are currently seeing and I felt I was way overdue for this upgrade.

In the coming posts, I'll spend a little time talking about why I did what I did... including why I chose to build this myself instead of having my team build it for me. Afterall, I'm not a web designer nor a developer. I'm a businessman and a web strategiest.

I'm curious to know what your thoughts on this design is. Please feel free to leave a comment below with what you think.

By the way, this website is designed using Drupal 7. I'll make sure to write a post talking about why Drupal brings some significant power to this website.