Why Should You Have Your Own Website?

Hello 👋 Today’s newsletter is a bit different (and smaller) than most. I have been quite busy during the past week and this week as well. Starting tomorrow, I’m having three three hour exams this week that count 100% towards my final grade. I don’t even know if this should be allowed.

Besides that, I’m also trying to find a place to move in during November. The place where I am at has a variety of issues, and the fact that they use hotel contracts and not regular rental contracts puts us, students, in vulnerable positions.

Nevertheless, I am here to discuss personal websites and why do I think everyone should have one! Right now, if I ask you (or virtually anyone else) if they have a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, (insert some other social network here) account, they will most likely reply “yes”. However, if you ask them if they have their own website, they probably won’t.

In first place, I would say that having a website can be a hub for all your work, interests and passions. You can share whatever you want, in the whatever format you want. You can customize everything. It’s not a silo where you can’t actually change anything but the basics. It’s your own world, your own personality, your own way of expression. Anything is valid. Anything.

As a second reason, and maybe arguably one: it can help you gain credibility. I saw this reason on many blog posts but I can see that this one could go both ways. We can also argue that it will help you build your own personal brand.

If you’re interested in backend or front-end development, building yourself your own website can also be an excellent opportunity for learning. You can design your own website and build its backend, or just go with a simple platform that allows you to visually make the website. Both work well. Just depends on what you want.

Having your own website is also an opportunity for you to free yourself a bit from the social media and showing a bit of yourself to the world.

You can check some other people’s personal websites on my blogroll, on this post on Lobste.rs. Another interesting place is the whimsical web, where you can find a curated list of awesome personal websites.

I see this subject working better as a discussion. So, please comment with your own opinion. Do you have a website? What’s the link? Don’t you? Why is that so?