Why You Should Make Your Own Website
If you’ve ever thought about making a website, there are certainly valid reasons for doing so. In this post, we’ll go over some of the top reasons.
1. Because you want to.
If you’ve wanted to make a website and you haven’t done it, the following points won’t have as much leverage as much as the simple desire to do it.
2. Your website, your rules.
What do you want the website to look like? Do you want ads? Do you want to be ad-free? Do you want a paywall? Do you want the ability for readers to leave comments?
When you have your own website, you’re the boss. It’s hosted how you want, it looks the way that you want it to look, and the site exists for you. This may seem obvious, but it’s worth considering if you’re debating between making your own website vs. hosting your content on an existing site.
3. It won’t get shut down.
If you haven’t heard, Peerlyst recently shared that they will be shutting down at the end of August. I’ve been seeing people who have used this platform for their writing looking for alternative places to host those articles moving forward.
This sort of thing happens. Companies and platforms don’t last forever. By having your own site, you don’t have to worry about this. Should part of your stack become unsupported, there are ways to adjust for that without your site or domain itself changing.
4. It doesn’t have to take long.
When it comes to making a website, there are a range of options that exist depending on the level of effort you want to put in and level of granularity/control you want over the site. This is the case for all aspects of the site.
- Domain: Any pre-built website platforms will provide the option to make a domain, but it will have some extra name in between your “domain” and the “.com” (i.e. yourdomain.website.com). Fully custom domains are nice, but if getting one is holding you up, it’s better to get started than to get hung up on this.
- Template/theme: Platforms providing the entire website will provide templates to use. If you choose to be more involved in the website stack, you can still use static site generators with community-built themes to start off your website with. If you like front-end development, this is your time to shine!
Making a website can be as much or as little work as you want it to be. The resources and tools exist; you just have to decide how you want to do it.
5. Get all the credit for your work.
Blogging platforms are great. I don’t have anything against them. However, it’s worth being aware of the fact that using them will mean that views and traffic you generate is ultimately generating traffic to their website. When you have your own site, you’re getting search engines like Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo used to seeing hits for and providing links to your site.
The respective benefit of a blogging platform is that people will end up on the site for many people’s posts, and may come across your posts if they end up checking out more posts around the site.
6. It’s a good learning experience.
If nothing else, it’s at least one personal project you can have. You can work on any amount or type of skills with it. Whether you’re building up front-end development skills, building familiarity with website-related tools, or learning new content for the purpose of being able to blog about it, there’s a lot of opportunity for learning.
So there you go, the top reasons (in my opinion) to make your own website. Do you have more good reasons for having a personal website? Share them with me on Twitter!