👨🏻‍💻 Importance Of Having A Personal Website

Backstory

I recently talked to a friend of mine about the opportunities that I started getting after publishing my work on the internet and how a few recruiters saw the work after visiting my website. Then he started sharing his stories about how his website had helped him. We both agreed to the fact that having a personal website helps you in so many ways and a few being:

• It helps you acquire new skills; you will keep customizing and polishing your website to have a professional look and feel. To enhance your personal brand, you’ll test new ways of conveying your message. Moreover, you’ll learn how to craft content that tells everyone what your thoughts, opinions and ideas are all about. Not only will you know how to engage your visitors, but you’ll also learn how to be more visible on social media and how to promote your site.
• A personal website is more dynamic than a cv and is much more creative.
• Helps recruiters find you much more efficiently, and enables you to land an internship or a job and gives you a competitive edge over others.
• Gives you the freedom to be creative, and every single detail in the website speaks volumes about you both professionally and as an individual.

Firstly, we need to address why one should have a website?

In this blog, I didn’t take the examples of famous personalities as they are quite ahead in the process from the general audience. So I just talked to a friend who has a website of his own and has been writing blogs weekly once for a year now. I asked him about all the benefits that he has experienced in the process, so he stated that :

1. He became a more skilled writer and a more competent communicator.
2. According to him, it helps your professional career too — it acts as an online cv. The chances are that the one who will hire you will probably google you up, so if you have an online website and he reads your blogs, it can be like, oh, it seems like you are interested in this too, we can talk about it.
3. It leads you to a lot of valuable connections.
4. You expose yourselves to lots of exciting opportunities: and in my friend’s case, he has been invited to write for many publications, featured in many articles, invited on podcasts and interviews too.
5. You can have a lot more impact than you would if you are not on the internet.
6. You can probably monetize it, but according to him, it will take a solid few years before you make money from it and making money shouldn’t be your primary goal; instead, the goal should be such that you need to have your personal brand as it can help you a lot in the future.

Having a presence on the internet in the modern-day is equivalent to just being very good at networking.

Having a website acts as a serendipity vehicle, which I have talked about in detail in : How Writing Online Is Very Beneficial. Having a personal website, is a really professional way of presenting your portfolio or just sharing your thoughts and ideas.

How to create a website?

Whom am I to talk about it? I have a good experience in the field of web development and have made responsive websites for over 6months now. My projects are available on My Website, and here is the link to my GitHub Profile: https://github.com/AnishGuruvelli, head over to them if you wish.

Home Page, Dark Mode, Style Switcher Colour — Blue

About Page, Light Mode, Style Switcher Colour — Red

So coming on to the points:

First comes the standard way of building a website from scratch using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. These three work together to form the front-end design by writing code that affects a site’s content, style, and interactivity. These are considered to be the backbone of the web.

It’s essential to note HTML and CSS are not considered to be programming languages. HTML is a markup language, and CSS is a styling language. JavaScript, however, is a programming language. Hence, they are all web languages, but they perform different jobs.

But when it comes to web development, there is front-end web development and back end web development, which makes it a long and tedious process to learn website development. This is where other alternatives come to save our time.

1. Firstly choose your platform. A platform is what hosts your website: square space, WordPress, Wix, ghost are a few of them, but these come under the paid section; if you are not sure whether you will do it for a Lon period o time or not, then I would personally advise going for sub stack as it is a free platform and is equally suitable for primary purposes.
2. Secondly, choose your domain. Generally, it is always paid, and the ones for free aren’t quite advisable. A few places where you can buy your domain are google domains and bigrock bigrock.in . If you don’t want to spend money on the domain, too, the free option, which I know is namespace, comes with a .free.me domain that isn’t entirely professional but will do for the initial few months. One good thing is that namespace is free for students.

Being a web developer myself, I wouldn’t recommend these options and advise people to build it from scratch. However, it is time-consuming, and a lot of time is spent in modifying the code every time you want to upload a blog onto your website. Hence I would suggest the 1st and 2nd points if you’re going to invest your time getting ideas and writing about them instead of managing the code.

Next comes the most crucial question, what to do with it and how to use it to your advantage, which I will be talking about in the next point.

What to do with it?

For a simple website, it needs three pages: about, blog, contact page.

• About Page — A simple description of who you are and what you do
• Contact Page — How to approach you, so your email id and your phone number too probably.
• Blog — The critical part of the website where you will be uploading your thoughts, opinions, views every week or so. Now, what to write about, is the next big question. This reminds me of the great saying by Austin Kleon in this book, Show Me Your Work! :

Document, Don’t Create

This way, it becomes effortless to think of ideas about what to write. The author says that if he was a total noob and with zero audiences, then he would probably be documenting the way he is living his life like,

• This is my morning routine, and this is why it is my morning routine.
• This an article that I read about, and this is what I think about it
• Here’s a book I read, and this is my review on it, a quick summary of the book, and link an amazon link to the book.

So documenting your own journey will be much easier rather than thinking about what you want to write. If you have read until here, you must be wondering, okay, fine, I will make a website and write blogs every week, but where will I get the audience and why anyone will want to read what I say. Head on to the next section to find your answers.

Now comes the question, why would anyone want to read it, or where will I get the audience?

Why would anyone want to read it? Everyone has something valuable to share, and everything you know is not so obvious, and some people don’t know it too. If you are feeling this, head on to this article: How to Beat the Imposter Syndrome.

Where will I get the audience? The solution nowadays is straightforward, when you write something, share it on every social media platform you are on. Nowadays, it’s not about search engine optimization. First, you share it with your friends and family, and one of those people share it with a friend of theirs maybe because they resonated with your idea and are like, hey, this seems interesting, let me share it with a few of my friends. I agree you won’t get instant results, but it’s worth the time that it takes

A few more questions

How do I make my website look prettier?

My advice, don’t care. People don’t care about the aesthetics, design, hover effect and all the fancy features. They only care about the content, the ideas, and the writing, and when you are using either square space or ghost, they look pretty by default.

How do I get my website to rank higher on google search?

Don’t try. It is improbable it will; don’t care much about it, focus on the content, do share it in your social media handles, and you are good to go. If it resonates with people, the kind of organic sharing of your article will lead to more website traffic.

Be so good that they can’t ignore you, by Steve Martin, a comedian.

What will people think?

People don’t care. They are busy with their own lives; if you feel this, head on to this article where I will be talking more about the causes of this feeling and what all solutions are available How Writing Online Is Very Beneficial.