Why you should have your own personal website?
Having your own space on the internet that you control helps a lot. In the last 20 years I have seen a lot of websites/platforms come and go. Twitter and Facebook will probably be gone in the next decade. When you have your own space, you could actually put effort in maintaining it.
I have been looking in my archive of tweets, blog posts on third party systems, bookmarking tools, and forums to build this website. Also looking backwards, I think it is nice to have it all in one place. I am not done yet, thousands of bookmarks/tweets/post to go through. In the end I will have an archive that starts in 2006 till now on my own website, cool to see how interest change and how I develop as a person.
Stability, maintainability, and control are the main reason I have my own personal website.
There are other reasons however:
- Build a professional online presence: showcase your skills, experiences, and accomplishments to potential employers, clients, or collaborators.
- Building your brand: build and promote your personal brand, which is beneficial if you are a freelancer, entrepreneur, or independent professional.
- Sharing your work and ideas: it allows you to share your work and ideas, which can be especially beneficial if you are a writer, artist, or other creative professional.
- Your content is not used by a platform to generate more advertisements.
- It is decentralised
How do you start?
You start by choosing a domain name. I would stick to domain names that uses Top Level Domain (TLD) .com, .net, .org, or TLD’s from countries. Like mine .is is the TLD of Iceland.
You register your domain name at a domain name register or webhosting company. Namecheap and Google Domains are examples of domain name registers. Hetzner and OVH are examples of hosting companies. Do a bit of research before deciding which company to use.
I register my domain names at 1984.is, a company in Iceland. Iceland has excellent privacy and free speech protections, known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative.
If you are a bit technical and used git before it is easy to setup a website with static site generators like Hugo. Also the actual hosting can be done for free or almost free by using GitHub Pages, CloudFlare Pages, Netlify, or Vercel.
If you are not that technical then there are excellent options for you.
- the old and reliable Wordpress
- Squarespace
- Bear blog
- Ghost
- Substack
What content to put on your website?
It can be anything you want off course 😁
- A portfolio to showcase your work.
- Blog about topics that show your expertise.
- Micro blog: you do not have to write long posts to blog, you could also write micro posts, like tweets or toots.
- Just a business card with your contact details.
- Link to posts or websites that you read and find interesting.
Keep it simple! You do not have to start big. Start small.