Everything you need to build a personal website

Whether you like it or not, participating in The Internet is one of the most important parts of operating in this increasingly remote-first job economy. Employers aren't just looking locally anymore, and pretty much every job posting will have amazing candidates from around the world.

This means you need every bit of presence and credibility you can to get in the front door of any reputable company.

This sounds scary (it is), it's not as bad as it sounds. It really isn't that hard to be an above average person online, and honestly, just showing up and being mildly interesting is half the game (these are surprisingly, and unfortunately, high bars.)

Regardless of whether you're Very Online on some social media platform, or you do not want to be perceived by anyone, it's a good idea to have a personal website that you fully control as a fallback. Whether it's an active blog you'll link to every day or a one-pager you only point at during job interviews, having something that has your name on it, that you can use to showcase your work, make you appear in search engine results, and bring with you throughout your career is incredibly powerful.

The good news is that it's easier than ever to actually get a website up and running. But still, I get lots of questions about how to get started, what the best tools are for hosting a website, and what kind of content you should put on it.

In this post, I'm going to throw down my (current!) recommendations on how I approach personal websites. They should generally apply to most people, marketer or not, who are not really technical and don't really want to labour over building something. (If that's not you, who hurt you?)

Recommended tools and platforms for building personal websites

There are a lot of website tools out there these days. Most of them suck! Many (namely, Weebly and Wix that are commonplace) are affordable—and for a reason. They're not very feature-rich, and they take a lot of work to make something passable.

And don't get me started on WordPress. Yes, paying for hosting and installing WordPress will be cheaper than my recommendations. But unless you're able to do your own coding, templates or builder plugins like Divi will end up being way more expensive. I've wasted tens of hours of my life trying to get WordPress to be functional, and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.

There are always exceptions, but if you're just a normal person making a simple personal website or blog, explore these tools first:

Squarespace and Ghost

Squarespace and Ghost are my two main recommendations for most people, as they cover a lot of the same bases that I think are important for personal websites, but each has some particular strengths that are worth calling out.

Generally, I recommend using a website builder that is easy to setup and use, and won't waste a lot of your time to maintain going forward—this is why I don't recommend using any flavour of WordPress anymore.

Squarespace is simply the most accessible and feature-rich website builder out there today. It's expensive, but I've learned the hard way that pinching $5-10/month on a different service ends up costing you in the long-run. Squarespace isn't really the best for managing lots of content, but if you're just looking to build a basic profile website with the occasional blog post, then it'll do everything you need with ease.

If you're looking to produce a ton of content, like weekly blog posts, newsletters, and other multimedia, Ghost is probably a better bet for you. It's designed for content producers, giving you the benefits of a Content Management System (CMS) like WordPress, without the headaches. This isn't to say Ghost is an easy to use product—there is definitely a technical learning curve here, but for people looking to build (and even monetize) a content empire, this is the platform for you.

Shopify

If you want to eventually sell things yourself, or you want to explore a career in ecommerce, Shopify is the only platform that you should use, full stop.

Website builders with ecommerce features suck, and other ecommerce builders suck, that's just how it is. It's definitely a more expensive option if you're just looking for web page and blog content publishing, but having the ability to properly sell things or to have skill with a tool that is taken seriously in the ecommerce space can be worth that price tag

Notion + Fruition

Ok, this isn't a really efficient recommendation, but I like it. You can turn a portion of your Notion workspace into a public-facing website. It's only a tiny bit technical, and I wouldn't use it for a large website, but it's actually free. There's also something satisfying about just dragging pages from your draft, private groups into your public website groups, and they just magically appear.

To set this up, follow the guide on Fruition. It'll involve you creating a free Cloudflare Workers account, adding a script, and pointing your domain's DNS records at it.

This setup definitely has limitations. Designing anything is manual, you're restricting to the widgets in Notion, and you have to create your web page URLs manually. But, it's one less tool, and it's free.

Anatomy of a personal website

If you need to go get a website, open up a new tab and evaluate those options above. I'll give you a minute or two.

Great, now here's a rough outline of what pages your website should have.

Home page

The beginning of your website. The first impression you give your readers. Generally, home pages should provide your personal elevator pitch or mission statement, then provide simple navigation to other, more focused pages.

The latter is pretty straightforward; create a navigation menu, then add some modules to link to your other pages, such as your latest blog posts.

But your elevator pitch is the hardest and most important part of your home page, if not your entire website. In a couple sentences, you should be able to explain what you do. It should be interesting enough that people jump down to a quick elevator pitch that might be a couple paragraphs, elaborating on your current role, skills, and aspirations. If you need more space, then you can link out to an About Page.

Now Page

Just kidding. Even better than an About Page is a Now Page - you can learn about those here and see many great examples.

In short form: a Now Page is a more actionable and descriptive About Page. They explain what you're currently doing (and if you want, what you don't want to be doing.)

Blog

Even if you don't write and publish frequently, you should have a section of your website dedicated to your thoughts. It doesn't have to necessarily be a Blog - I've seen people have Essays or Thoughts sections for longer/shorter content respectively.

While this post isn't going to go into depth on how to write blog posts, one great way to use and fill up your Blog quickly is to re-publish content you've written for your day job and tag it as such. You never know when your employers will change their website or delete your posts, so simply linking out to things you've written is not a guaranteed way to keep reference.

Career History

If your website is being used to help with a job search, you should have a resume-style page living somewhere. Just treat this like you would a resume, but lean into the flexible, more dynamic nature of website builders. Have fun with it!

One important thing that you should do is link out to projects or work you've done at those places. You could list those on your Career History, or create dedicated pages for those employers with a list of projects and achievements. This is a great way to provide additional context to prospective employers that you may not have space for in a traditional resume or cover letter.

Projects, Case Studies, and Testimonials

This is a hodgepodge section of social proof. Basically, you should talk about the things you've done in whatever format makes the most sense for your work. You can do full tear downs of projects, roundups of links to things you've done, or write more traditional business case studies.

You can also get testimonials and references from people you've worked with or for. These can be like proactive references that an employer may ask for, and while they may not count as items to submit for a job application process, they can still signal that you're a great person to work with.

Links to your other projects

If you've got other projects, whether they're side hustles or just fun things you do, link them here. If they have fully fledged websites or social presences, you can just link to those from your navigation. If that's bloated, you can create a dedicated section or page for them to explain the project, then link out to relevant resources.

Contact

Finally, the general call-to-action for your website. Many website builders have built-in forms that just send to your email, and this is generally the easiest and most accepted thing to do. You could also link to your preferred social profiles (don't need to list them all.)

So, now what?

Congratulations on owning your own personal little haven on this hellscape we call Online. Do whatever you want with it!

Keep it up to date, write the odd thing, and point people to it when it makes sense. Include it on your job applications, store some of your work samples, host useful resources that you've collected or curated, and document your thoughts so you can easily share them with others.