Make it Personal

In 2020, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: people are still creating personal websites, even though major social networks and content publishing platforms are competing for our content, stories and attention. This year, many people have created or restarted their personal websites, and personal websites seem to be reviving.

This didn't surprise me. The benefits of owning a personal website are huge and tempting. As a creator, posting content on your own website is probably the best thing you can do, whether professionally or personally.

Your voice

On your personal website, you own your work. You decide what to publish and when to publish. You decide when to delete the content. You have control. Your works, your rules, your freedom.

Your personal website is also an excellent test site where you can adjust, prototypify, experiment, explore, and learn network standards and new technologies through practice. Want to improve your accessibility skills? Want to learn CSS Grid or try variable fonts? Want to implement your first Service Worker or fine-tune your website performance? Your personal website is the perfect place!

But the primary reason for owning a personal website is its name: it is your personal home on the Internet. From the early days, the Internet was about information sharing and freedom of speech. The personal website still delivers on that promise. Nowhere else, you don’t have so much freedom to create and share your work, as well as tell your personal stories. This is your opportunity to show your position, be unique and be concrete. Your website makes you unique to you and it can be anything you imagine.

So, if you have a personal website, make sure to put in your time and effort to make it truly belong to you. Make it personal. Fine-tune the typography, add the theme switcher, or add other quirky little details to add personality. As Sarah Drasner wrote, you can feel whether a website is produced with care and passion. These sites are delightful and memorable.

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Your actions

If you want to start creating your own personal website, two things are crucial:

1. You have to start. You can start with something small and basic. But, start. Create a blog with WordPress, use a static website generator like Eleventy, a cute flat file CMS like Kirby, or write all the code from scratch. It depends on you. The technology stack doesn't matter, as long as you start.
2. Realize that your website is not "completed" after it goes online. After it went online, the journey has just begun. Many creators forget this and struggle to have to maintain the website and publish their work there. That's why it's very important to be clear from the beginning what you want to post and then build your website around it. Do you want to write? Very good! Then focus on the reading experience and create a blog section. Do you want to post photos or illustrations? marvelous! Then make sure your website’s layout and structure is built for this and it is easy to publish new images. If you know what you want to post, it will be much easier to develop the habit of creating and posting it to your website.

Remember, you don’t have to consider yourself a writer to write on your website. You don't have to be a programmer to write code on your website. You don't have to be a famous expert to express your opinions. Record your process and share what you have learned. Try different formats, different styles and different themes. Write a concept or an idea at a time. Or, if you like tricks, post your best tricks. The journey is the destination, and there will always be others who can benefit from even the smallest posts you have.

Releasing your work can be scary, especially at the beginning. You may feel like you're being judged. Everyone can check your source code, see your tiny mistakes, and notice how serious you made. But this is also part of the process. It is this process that makes it so worth building, maintaining and growing your personal website. Allow yourself to be vulnerable, overcome your fears, and click Post . When you post content on your personal website regularly, it will inevitably grow and grow. You will do the same.

Your community

There is a community of creators there, eager to contribute your perspective. We implement Webments on our website, add blog links to our website again, and we may even make the web loop back. We subscribe to each other’s feeds, and we are sharing and citing each other’s works and articles. In 2021 and in the coming years, we need you and more people to keep the network open, independent and diverse. Hidde de Vries recently shared this passage he read on Jeremy Keith's personal website:

If you have something good, if you don't defend it, you will lose it.

Zeynep Tefepkçi (via adactio.com)

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Personal websites are such a thing. If you don't have a website yet, join us where the network is still (still) personal. It's worth it.

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