27 Oct 2024 on chupson's Blog
The internet is an amazing little piece of technology. You can find just about anything here, and you can relatively easily create just about anything, as evidenced by this very website and blog. Though, with the rise of social media, fewer and fewer people decide to make anything other than a profile. Well, I think having a website still is very nice, and I wish more people would make them.
But why should you make a website? It does require a bit of a time, and likely financial, investment, so why would anyone bother? At the end of the day, it is obviously up to your own preference, but I do have some arguments I find quite convincing, so please read them, think about them, and you might just discover you would like to have a website.
A website can be a one-stop place where anything and everything about you that you want shared on the internet can be found. You know the little links and bios most social media platforms give you, so that you can link to your other social media platforms? And what about when you want someone to find you on the internet? Where do you point them? Your Instagram? Twitter? TikTok? A great way to solve this problem (or slight annoyance) is a website. That way you have a single source of truth, and a gateway too all the other places you want to be found on the internet. Whenever someone asks where they can find you, point them to your website. Whenever you create a new profile, link to your website. And, on the aforementioned website, you can do whatever you want. You can link to all your social media profiles, or some of them, or none of them, whatever you would like. You can provide your email address for people to contact you with, or not. And, as I mentioned before, that website would be the one and only source of truth you have to worry about. If you, for example, change your Twitter handle (assuming that’s possible, I’m not sure), you don’t need to go through all your other social media and change the relevant links there, you only need to change the link on the website.
At least for me, having a website comes with a huge sense of freedom. While you can’t do everything on the internet, you are certainly much, much less limited than on most, if not all, social media platforms. Yes, if you attempt to do something less than legal on your website, the local government might take issue with that and attempt to find and stop you. But no one is going to stop you from saying a word they don’t like (unless your government is particularly strict), and mentioning alternative ways of accessing YouTube is allowed. Go try yt-dlp, it works great for me.
Outside of censorship, there are some other limitations social media platforms put on what you’d like to post, mostly relating to the form-factor of what you’re trying to do. Websites share few of those limitations. Maybe you’d like to share a picture of your dog with the world. If so, Instagram would do just fine. But what if you would like to do something Instagram doesn’t allow you to do? Or if you want to do many different things? A website is great for that. You can do everything on here! Go ahead and start a blog. Blogs are pretty cool. Maybe you’d like to give people an interactive experience, like a quiz? That could be fun, put that on your website. Or maybe you’d like the website itself to be a form of creative expression. Go crazy! Try to design a modern looking website or go crazy, try out some insane gradients or backgrounds. Be unique, the sky’s the limit!
As a little cherry on top, a website usually means a domain, and a domain has more uses than just pointing to your website, it can also, for example serve as your email domain, which I also think is nice.
In our discussion about websites my friend said that having a website “is like having a home but in the internet”, and that really says it all.
Say I convinced you and you want to make a website. Well, how should you go about it? There are definitely better resources than this here website to learn the specifics, but I’ll give you an overview.
A website has to live somewhere. There are multiple places to put it, some free, some paid. For starters, there are some sites that offer free site hosting. They have some limitations in what you can do on them, but for a basic, static, site they should easily be enough. The ones I know of are Github Pages and sourcehut pages.
If you’re fine with paying and want more control over your website, consider getting a VPS. To use it you have to setup an HTTP server yourself, but it’s a great learning experience if you’re willing to put in a bit of time. Getting the cheapest VPS at Linode, Vultr, or whatever you’d like should easily be enough.
You’ll also need a domain to point to your website. I think there are some places where you can get those for free, but I don’t think that’d work out well. Github and sourcehut pages offer you a subdomain for free, but if you want to have your very own domain you’ll have to pay. It’s not much though, you can get a .com domain for around 10 bucks a year, and there are some that you can get for even less. I’d recommend buying at Namecheap
Once you have all the other stuff you still have to actually make the website. There are multiple ways to go about it though. If you just want to get something going, just learn the basics of HTML and CSS, and make something simple. You can also pair that with a static site generator like Hugo to more easily create a blog or something of a “blog-like” structure. That’s what I did. You can also use this as an opportunity to learn web development and learn React, or whatever it is they use over there in web dev land.
And if all that sounds too daunting to you, you can always ask a friend who knows how to do that stuff for help! That’s what friends are for.