I want a personal website. I need one. I’m consumed with building one, but I don’t know the best way to go about it. I have a domain name, but I can’t code from scratch to have it make sense. I tried, but the CSS was killing me, even with ChatGPT’s help.
I’m nostalgic for the days of Geocities when you can make whatever you want about whatever you want. I want to but my hands are a bit novice for this. I’ve been trying but I can’t seem to make something that makes sense. I had Neocicites but abandoned it — the upkeep was too cumbersome.
It’s only when I was playing with Readymag just now that I realized a site doesn’t have to have blogging capabilities. But then how do I organize things? I think over the years my brain has been forced to think of a site structure to be something like:
HOME
Brief overview
Sample images
Some kind of artist statement
ABOUT
Bio
Contact form
BLOG
Chronological posts also categorized by tags
PORTFOLIO
Photos
Drawings
Arts & Crafts
This architecture is limiting. But it’s also how I have learned to organize data. What if it doesn’t have to be that way? What if every page contained within the site is an art piece itself? I think I get lost in what I’m trying to make. I don’t know if I want a showcase. I don’t know what I have to show, even. What is the point of a personal site? Maybe I need to understand what I’m trying to make first.
It’s not a site to be monetized, or to make me any money. It’s just where I can deposit the weird things I like.
I know I like the structure of Notion, but I don’t like it implemented as a website. I know because this is live right now using Bullet.so. But this isn’t it. I would prefer all the data in my Notion to be just for me.
So what are the restrictions right now? I think it’s the price tag. Knowing me, and my tendency to abandon projects, I don’t want to start a site just to give up on it because I don’t have a clear idea going in. It feels like a waste of money.
So here’s a little audit of what we’re looking at, price wise.
Site/Host | Price (Annual) | Notes |
Bullet.so | $84 | Notion based, highly limited in styling. |
Readymag | $168 | No blogging, messy content management. Capped at 10k views/mo. |
Square Space | $228 | Basic plan — no custom code injection. |
Cargo | $168 | Site builder not intuitive AT ALL |
Wordpress.com | $120 | Capped at 13gb storage |
Wordpress.org | ?? | Self hosted, big hassle to set up. |
Tilda.cc | $120 | Still exploring the site builder, but it’s def not as flexible as Readymag. |
Showit | $228 | I’ve never tried it. This tier has no blog and 20gb of storage. |
Now the project is, figuring out what I want to show the world, and why. If I were to abandon what I think a website’s architecture should be, what would be left?
Where do I want to be, on the internet? Here is a list of where I currently frequent:
- Notion (brain dump, daily logs)
- Substack (long form writing)
- Ko-Fi (linked to Substack for tips)
- TikTok
- Are.na (inspo)
There should be more, but the internet has been reduced to various social media sites/apps. Gone are the days of choice and variety. Maybe this is why I so desperately want a space of my own. But honestly, I always have, just never figured it all out. I think I want a site to be too many things. I used to think it has to sell me as a person, but that’s what my work site is for. That, I also have to re-make because it’s ridiculous looking right now.