For last 1000 years I have been pounding over personal website thing. To develop or not develop - this is my question.
Social networks pretty much covers everyone's needs: professional, personal, image-only, sound-only. I am sure you can find any network nowadays.
Personal website demands wide range of skills to make it feel good. Design, hosting or cloud, programming, search optimization, accessibility features, structural and linked content. More you know, more it feels as a heavy budgeted and time consuming Project. Oh, and I missed legal stuff like data collection, terms and conditions... you name it.
What exactly are you going to tell people? The most common kind of personal pages is a portfolio, maybe a blog or a funny gig. It is anyway something related to brand building. But is there anything above and beyond?
On a flip side.
Personal website is something you control. It is like having small part of the internet in your hands. Your digital territory, where no ads, no BS will ever appear by definition.
It can be a precious gem if you pull it out.
Thoughts?
Feel free to share your personal site, I would love to see it.
TL;DR
I guess it was my youngster dream, where tech wasn't that advanced. Unfortunately for me the tech overgrown my dream.
Yet again I am on the edge to stop domain renewals and let it die naturally.
Oldest comments (7)
You're over-complicating things :)
You 100% don't need all that stuff to start with a website. Heroku and the like make it relatively easy to ship a website for free. SEO? Who cares? Im honestly not that fussed if people see my site or not (which is why there is no analytics).
It's akin to waterfall project management, convincing yourself you need absolutely everything under the sun to release something useful.
The beauty of your own website is you can do 100% what you want to do with it. It's supposed to be fun! If you want to do all that stuff you listed go for it, but just release something basic to get yourself going and then iterate on it.
My website didn't take a lot of time at all to make initially and has just been slowly iterated on... as i feel like it. I've changed its look dozens of times over the years on a whim.
This is all in your head. You can still build websites out of HTML and CSS.
Yes, mine is just a pointer with few bits.
You nailed it I think.
Don't give up! Live the dream! Make a website NOW!
Write and deploy a SUPER FAST web site in 30 seconds with no framework.
David Wickes
I believe in you - you can do it! You don't need all the things you're worried about, and you can add them later if you do.
Do it now! What are you waiting for? DO IT!
I have my website for years and very well aware about site builders ;)
It is not about publishing html page, but whatever or not it makes any sense. Think about it as motivation.
Site builders? Like I'd use a framework ;)
This is Larry Wall's website: wall.org/~larry/
Larry Wall is demonstrably a much better programmer than any of us. And his website is pretty basic. If Larry Wall is OK with having a simple website with a lot of not that useful stuff on it, well, then so am I.
This is my website: blog.gypsydave5.com/
It is a bit better looking than Larry's.
I've looked at your website. The only issue I have is that massive JS file from Kaspersky in the head is blocking the page load. Other that that it's better looking than mine or Larry's.
So, yeah - I'd keep it. It's fun.
I built my portfolio initially in one night. From design -> code. I think they're important if you're trying to level up careerwise usually -- for me that was doing speaking gigs at that point. Now I'm more interested in blogging, but it's nice to have a landing page with everything I do on it.
Nice site!
Would love to hear more on this. Do you literally put everything?