My whole web development career has been built around building websites and web applications for other people. I first seriously learned how to code to build a website for a good friend. My first job was at an agency, where I punched out one website after another for clients. I now freelance, where I often create sites for clients from the very beginning stages of design to development and launch. I love going through that entire process with my clients. However, when it comes to creating my own freaking website, I am sad to say I have never been able to have a complete one for very long (longest one was a one pager that lasted about two months out of a dire need to find an internship).
Some time of retrospection revealed some reasons why I struggle with creating my own website:
1. It's never good enough - I am always changing my mind. Some thoughts that go through my head: Which projects should I showcase? Oh I don't like that color scheme anymore. That font doesn't really represent my personality. I need to rewrite my bio again!! and the insane list goes on and on and on...
2. I can never pick a framework - Because I developed on WordPress for a long time, every time I think I want to start on working on my website again, my natural tendency is to build it on WordPress. However, with so many cooler sounding frameworks that pop up every few months, I can't help but think that I should try building my site on one of those frameworks so that I could pick up a new framework along the way. The theory is good, but I usually end up in a rabbit hole learning the nuances and the shiny parts of the framework that I end up forgetting about my own website. Then I get distracted by something else and then the site is left unfinished. :(
3. I don't like updating it - When I was looking for internships while in college, I did create and launch a very simple one-page website using Bootstrap and a jQuery slider plugin. After I got an internship I never updated it and took it down shortly afterward. Because I created it so fast, I didn't have any process to easily update my work. Therefore, it became too tedious to maintain and #1 from above started to happen, so I shut the whole thing down.
I look at other developers' websites and am insanely jealous of their ability to buckle down and get theirs done and done so well. So I'm curious... what do you guys use to build your own personal website?
Latest comments (40)
I don't really have what you'd call a personal website. I have a flat, emptyish homepage and a bunch of differently-constructed sub-pages which aren't linked anywhere, rather I give the URL out to people as appropriate (like my CV or a demo app for example) and don't worry about being listed in search engines.
As such, I use whatever code I feel like for each thing. Mostly it's plain HTML/JS but there's a little PHP and Perl thrown in from time to time. I have tried using things like Grav and Netlify-CMS but in the end I just don't have the need for such things beyond the fun of experimentation.
Jekyll is awesome, our team works with Jekyll everyday as we build Shopify (Liquid) and custom Jekyll websites for clients. The framework is great for beautiful marketing websites and ecommerce sites.
Hugo, Grav, Drupal
Hugo, psnc.netlify.com - psnc.github.io
Grav now here as Cloud Platform psnc.frama.site
For my personal site (sebnitu.com) I use Jekyll and a personal front-end framework I call BaseWeb (getbaseweb.com) who’s docs are also built in Jekyll. Both are hosted on GitHub.
The thing I love about my setup is how low maintenance it is. I pretty much just write when I feel compelled to write about something and that’s about it. I intentionally kept it super minimal for that reason. Eventually I’ll add a portfolio too and when I’m ready to do that, the Jekyll theme I setup makes it very simple too.
I'm using Jekyll on Github pages. Dead simple, very fast, and everything is in markdown so it's easy to cross-post. Github pages allows you to set up custom domains pretty easily as well.
Very recognizable, it's called "paralysis by analysis", too many choices ... same reason why my site is also still not done (other reason is there is no urgency).
Also as a dev you tend to think "I need to use some cool technology" while in fact there's totally no reason, it's just a basic website ... in my case I thought "I want to use React" because I wanted to learn React but in the meantime I already learned React on a project, so there's no need.
I saw an ex-colleague of mine who created a website for his wife's company using static HTML/CSS/JS (no server side pages generation) with good old Bootstrap and some good looking images and well written text. HTML looks clean, with "sections" and all. It looks mainstream (nothing original or flashy) but it looks clean, fairly modern, professional and friendly.
I think if ever I need to finish my website then this is what I would go for, just download and clone that stuff and replace the text and the images. I'm not a web design artist and my website doesn't need to demonstrate cutting edge, so I just keep it down to earth and use what works.
I use Jekyll, Bootstrap and host on github pages for my personal blog. I like it because it uses a simpler structure than Wordpress (a static site vs the DB and PHP code behind Wordpress). I kept it to a simple layout as it's just a blog site and I didn't want anything to fancy. I like that Jekyll uses markdown,which I find easy to use to create blog posts. The one downside of hosting on github pages is you can't run all the plugins available to Jekyll. But it's free, so I stay. My site is monicagranbois.com
Another vote for Jekyll + GitHub pages I see! I like the idea of going serverless since hosting WordPress has been a pain for me. I like your site! Very clean and straight to the point :)
If you don't mind using a programming language like Scala, try my sbt-hepek plugin. You can make your HTML templates in Scala's
traits. Then you just implement an abstract method that will be the content of your page. :) So, it's not a real framework but just a handy tool for generating static files. :D You can find more examples here, rendered at blog.sake.ba.I've used a variety of things over time to create a personal site/blog (WordPress, Ghost, etc). I am currently using Jekyll + GitHub Pages and have been happy with it.
While the other platforms were nice, I found that when I self-hosted my site I never took time to update the platform I was using. With static-site generation and GitHub Pages I don't have to worry about updates and security. That is being handled for me. I can't really speak to creating themes for Jekyll because I used an open-source template and made slight modifications.
I also like that my content is all markdown and could easily be ported to a different platform.
Thanks, I like the sound of Jekyll + GitHub approach. I also like the idea of having all my content in markdown and being able to port it easily to a different platform.
My personal website is built with WordPress.
My personal-business is built with plain HTML, CSS and JS. However, I'm preparing a new version that will run on Laravel and VueJS (part of me learning those two things).