How to make a personal website
Hello again!
In my last post, I explained why I made a personal website. In this post, I will share with you how I approached this in case you wanted to try this yourself. Be aware, it took me a while to get it just right. The most time intensive element was deciding on the colors and making sure they were used properly across the site. I’ll get into that later, but just know making a personal website was an undertaking that took me somewhere around 10 hours to make.
Okay, so here is how I stood up my personal website:
Part 1: Getting an actual site
Select your website building software. I evaluated Squarespace, Wix, GoDaddy, and Wordpress. There are countless more, but these seem to be the most popular. As a Marketer, I have experience with website management which influenced my priorities in selecting a website builder.
My Priorities:Easy and user friendly, while still allowing me to customize (so not the most basic tool).
Purchase my domain through the website builder. If not, you have to buy it externally and go through the hassle of connecting it, which seemed unnecessary.
Design oriented ethos. Branding is a critical non-verbal communication tool. It reflects a lot about a company or person and I wanted to ensure the platform I selected supported me in that mission.
Price. I didn’t want to spend an arm and a leg on this. The cheaper, the better.
SEO (search engine optimization)…honestly, not a huge priority of mine because I am not doing this to be a mega-influencer. I would like some features so I can be found on Google, but my promotion plan revolves more around occasional LinkedIn posts and maybe a newsletter.
My Eval:
Squarespace - clearly won the evaluation. While you can’t make a website from scratch (it seems like it’s in beta?), you can take one of their many templates and change it entirely to fit your needs. In fact, that was likely easier to have a template as starting point. I purchased my domain and it was all together cheaper than the other options, though not by too much.
Wix - I liked Wix, though I opted against it because it seemed more focused on helping small business website. Squarespace also has e-commerce features, but Wix seemed to be particular specialized in this department, so I moved on.
GoDaddy - I just didn’t like anything about this option. If I recall correctly, it was the most expensive option and it just wasn’t user friendly. I also hate their name and branding, so I didn’t feel confident they would support me with my own design ethos.
Wordpress - for corporate sites, it’s a great platform due to its many integrations. It is not, however, easy to use. The UX is just clunky, but you can build literally anything. It was just too robust for my simple needs and so I moved on.
Buying a domain. Once you select your website building software, this is fairly straight forward. Within Squarespace, I purchased the rights to annette8a.com for $20 and an annual subscription to Squarespace for $172. They made it very easy and straightforward.
Selecting a template. Pick and choose! In this process, I did accidentally make a bunch of test sites while trying out different templates. Ultimately, the template I chose mattered less than I had expected because changing the template was so easy. You also have to make sure your template is assigned to the domain you bought.
Part 2: Building out Branding
Research. I browsed a few different personal websites, which was hard because finding personal websites isn’t very easy (maybe a strong case for prioritizing better SEO features…). Still, I found a few to give me inspiration.
Selecting a “look and feel”. I wrote down a list of elements I wanted people to infer or feel while they were on my page. My words were “clean, elegant, interesting, understated, helpful, and fun”.
Picking a color palette. This was really fun at first, and then it was quite frustrating because it took so long to get it just right. Designers and perfectionists of the world, I am sure you can feel my plight. Anywho, I went with a dark green because: (1) it’s easy on the eyes, (2) it reminds my of a forest / natural world, (3) is not the standard color people use for backgrounds, but is still clean, intiguing, and elegant - in my opinion. Then I literally googled “dark green color palattes” and a bunch of flower photos in the woods showed up as inspiration. Initially, I picked a pink and green combo because the pink was a beautiful fun pop. On my site, however, I felt like the colors were not real compliments and thus, too harsh. Also, I get nervous leaning in too hard on a pink because I have been conditioned to tread carefully around flaunting femininity in a male-dominated workplace. Clearly, I still went with a lavender, so I don’t care that much about it, but I would be lying if it wasn’t a consideration. My [future] sister-in-law, Jen Peters, happens to be an exceptional designer and illustrator and so she advised me with a few other complimentary colors. Again, this took a long time and I benefited from the use of photoshop to play with my colors. It was also annoying to get the color settings within Squarespace right and, to be honest, I don’t really know if the default color allocation is even set up properly, but I just change the color if I think it’s being improperly used.
Making a logo. Fortunately, Canva has free logo creation options that were awesome. This was so much fun and it was really easy! They have many free options and you can play around with the colors and sizing. I highly recommend this option. Again, I wanted things to be very clear that this is my personal brand name, which is why I just went with my name and emphasized the “8a” as an interesting way to stand out and be memorable.
Voila! Here is my website! I hope this was helpful and I hope you learned something.
Until next time!