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?
Oldest comments (40)
I did mine using Wordpress. I'm not an expert. I just like how beginner-friendly it is. When you are starting out, I thought that was pretty easy to understand and publish blog posts and stuff like that. I'm not sure I will touch the design too much. It's pretty basic I think, but it does the trick for me.
In retrospect, considering where my career is heading, it might have been fun to use a more javascript-centric CMS, like Keystone. I could have work on my personal website while learning more Javascript. But, I use my website as a way to store blog posts. I'll probably list projects I've been working on in the future. But, things will stay very simple for that too.
Here's what I built my personal site with and I'd do it again:
Plain-old HTML, CSS and a bit of plain old JavaScript. One of the biggest impediments for going back to update a thing are dependencies. They are the easiest thing to lose track of, forget how to set up, etc. It's also generally nice to use the raw tools.
On a bigger project that I'll touch regularly and do more powerful thing with, I'm all for the right frameworks, preprocessors, etc. as long as they are appropriately mature and developer-friendly.
It's really nice to have a static personal site that does not need to be compiled or processed in any way, or rely on code that is not contained within the project. Maybe you can't do as much without it getting stringy, but I see that as sort of a bug instead of a feature.
Another tip: I'd advise inlining the CSS in the body and async the JavaScript if it's reasonable within your site structure. This radically reduces worst-case rendering latency.
This is my personal site: benhalpern.com
Don't take it as an indication that I'm not 100% serious about what I've outlined above. 😋
Your personal site...yeah...ummm... WTF, man?! :)
I think the word you're looking for is transcendent.
I think this is the greatest personal site I've ever seen. I'd hire you in a heartbeat.
Thanks for your tips! Keep it simple, I like that. Your site is super awesome by the way. Where did you get your inspiration from? 😋
That was amazing and it brings me so much joy that pages like yours still exist. The only think I would suggest is that you add https so no one can ever ruin the masterpiece you have made.
Wow - thanks for the CPU workout... LOL
lol @ the "Here is a link to nothing: localhost:3000"
Your site is amazing. The youTube video!! :D
(You seem to be using "personal" to talk about both personal and personal-business, so I'll answer both.)
Currently: business uses Vue.js with pug templates (on GitHub under "djs-consulting.com", if you're interested), personal uses Jekyll with a theme based off its previous iteration.
Past:
I don't see myself moving away from Jekyll anytime soon; it's perfect (IMO) from a resource utilization perspective. How many database queries should it take to load a old blog post about the 2008 election, or a cheesy sausage hashbrown recipe? With Jekyll, that number is 0, which I think is correct one.
Anyway - I write all that to show you that you're not alone in not leaving your personal site alone. :) In my case, part of the churn is that I'm doing this as a side project (though I am a day-job programmer as well), so I'm trying to do it as cheaply as possible. Resource utilization is a big deal. I love the .NET ecosystem, and F# in particular; .NET Core has really helped make that run fast on my dirt-cheap Linux VMs. Plus, WordPress can be quite the hassle if you don't run where your web server can write to the files that it serves; I'm glad they push regular updates, but sometimes the things they fix make me happy that PHP couldn't write to the web server while the bug was active.
Finally, what I have (sadly) left alone is the content; Facebook ended up getting a lot of the material that would have gone there instead. I'm trying to get better about writing something, but that would mean I'd have to stop writing code long enough to do it. Being a part of this community is encouraging me to find the time to at least start writing up some tech stuff.
Jekyll is pretty sweet.
I've even used it to prototype and mock up work that had to be recoded from scratch for another CMS in XSLT (ugh)…
I've heard lots of great things about Jekyll, especially if I want to eventually write blog posts there, which I am also hoping to do more of thanks to the support and encouragement of this community. :) Thanks for sharing!!
Static HTML/CSS/vanilla JavaScript, hosted on GitHub.
isaaclyman.com
I know a lot of devs feel like they need a site with project examples, blog posts, scrolljacking/parallax, a visual resume, and so forth. That's fine. I prefer a minimal, attractive, responsive "me hub" with links to GitHub, Medium, and Stack Overflow, and a list of technologies I'm working with lately.
It's tiny, requires almost no maintenance, and still demonstrates that I know how to write consistent, readable markup and code. I doubt I'll ever want one more complicated than that.
Interesting... it's true that my work can be viewed on GitHub, my blog posts (which I hope to eventually write) can be on Medium so most of the content won't need to be on the personal site. I like your simple approach. I will keep it in mind. Thanks for sharing!
I frequently see "originally published on my site/blog xyz" on medium articles and dev.to so no reason why you couldn't have them on your blog too. Not sure how this affects duplicate content for SEO so check that out first
For the "Hi, ask me about x" page there's just plain CSS and a tiny bit JS. For the blog I use Wordpress with a minimal theme, mainly because when I made it I had tens of posts from Blogspot which I didn't want to lose and could import easily with a plugin. I planned to switch to Kirby (which I use for clients) but the two posts a year just aren't worth it.
In my case, it's "whatever I am currently trying to learn". And I re-engineer a lot (I try for every couple of years)
Re-designing websites with new tech stacks is, from a business or time-efficiency standpoint, a terrible idea, but from a learning standpoint, it's great. You get to work on something you are passionate about, which keeps you invested in the learning.
Right now I'm upgrading to Rails 5 so that I can convert most of the views to Preact.
Been a few years since I've had an actual personal website (and not just a redirect to LinkedIn); however, in the past I've kept things dirt simple: HTML, CSS and a pinch of PHP.
For everything else, my go-to CMS is Contao contao.org. Simple templates, many common website "features" included in the core system, multi-site and multi-language capable, backend user workflow and content security.
I used Next.js with the static export feature to generate plain old HTML with inlined CSS and deploy it under ▲ZEIT Now, here's the site sergio.now.sh and here's the code sergiodxa/personal-site (it implements a service worker too just for fun). For things like a personal blog I use Medium or dev.to and I just have a simple list of all my published articles in my personal site so I don't need a WP or something similar to create a blog.
The short answer? It depends on your goals for your site.
Pithy? Yup. Helpful? Probably not... here's my best answer in the context of the struggles mentioned.
It's never good enough
Absolutely. Never will be. Just like a mechanic's car will never be 100%, there's always something ... different ... about doing for yourself the work you normally do for others. Sometimes it helps to try to frame it in the more familiar terms of the client/dev relationship by either getting a friend to stand in for one side or the other, or to do some rubber duck style planning.
I've got a few sites going now, and not a one would I consider "good enough":
There are a few others, but these each have unique answers for the next two bits so
I can never pick a framework
Who says you have to pick just one? Each project has it's own requirements, and sometimes any framework at all can be overkill for a project. Most are up on GitHub (some hosted on GitHub pages) if you want to poke around and see what's there. If we go through the list, you'll see:
I've used my personal and side projects as playgrounds for the stuff I've been meaning to try out. I've found that trying something without a specific goal really isn't helpful, so having the project focuses my testing and helps me figure out what is a good fit for certain projects. Case in point - my sister is getting ready to start a blog. As much as I've been playing with static site generators I can tell that it's not a good fit for her. Instead I ended up recommending Square Space. Could I have built her a CMS and hosted it? Sure, but not on the timetable she's looking for.
I don't like updating it
Can't say I blame you on this one, I've got the same problem... Jesus Joshua 24:15 has been on hiatus, Eastover Fire Department shut down their website, I haven't been a part of Hope Fellowship for years - and most of the work I've done lately is stuck behind the corporate firewall.
That was the impetus for a couple of the projects above - I needed some new work to put on Wayward Son Developers, and work that I could showcase without legal issues. :)
I don't have a process either, I'll post something when I come up with one.
Hmmm...
So, after looking over 950-ish words I'm not sure I actually answered your question any more helpfully than the pithy initial response. Is there anything I can clarify/expand that would rescue this long ramble?
Haha, thanks for sharing your experiences with clear samples. Glad to know I'm not the only one having these thoughts.
For my project's site I used static HTML, CSS, vanilla Javascript and a third party Javascript library for HTML5 canvas effects.
The site consists of a Home Page and a Documentation Page and is not yet online.
I have avoided using a Cms like WordPress or any server-side language like PHP because I do not need them for a simple site.