Dale NguyenThis post includes affiliate links; I may receive compensation if you purchase products or services from the different links provided in this article.
Your personal website always belongs to you. It’s the best and easiest investment that you could make. Why do I say that? It’s because
If you are still in school — your website is your portfolio.
If you’re working — your website is your portfolio and branding.
My old website (http://dalenguyen.me) was created by using PHP Laravel Framework and hosted on Microsoft Azure. It served me well when I searched for a Developer position a few years ago. Now, it’s time to revamp it because technology has changed and my startup account on Microsoft is going to expired.
In this article, I will show you how to build your personal website in order to bootstrap or advance your career in tech.
Step one— Get a domain name (Namecheap) <-- Affiate Link ;)
You only pay around $10 for a domain name a year. What is the excuse to not get one? Search for your name or something that represents your branding. I use namecheap, but you can use any domain providers on the market.
Second step — Hosting
For your personal website, I don’t think that you should buy a shared or dedicate hosting at all. There is plenty of choices that can host your website for FREE: Github pages, Firebase or Netify.
In case of getting famous overnight, you can always migrate your website to another hosting provider.
Step three — Doing research on the design
You don’t want your website to look crappy, so doing research is essential. Just google personal website design or portfolio website design in order to get an idea on how you want to organize your website, and how does it look and feel with a color scheme.
You can always ask for a friend who knows UX/UI design or goes to Fivver to get one. And remember to treat your friend well and fair — I mean pay them or take them to a restaurant if they don’t want money.
Step four — Start building your personal website
Now, it’s the fun part. If you are a web developer, pick the langue that you want to work with. In my case, I’m redoing my website by using the Angular framework. It’s a great chance to showcase your design and coding.
If you don’t know all that stuff, ask for help or learn basic HTML/CSS would help. A simple website doesn’t need much except HTML/CSS and some JavaScript.
If you want to know how I rebuilt my personal website with Angular and Github pages, you can give this one a read.
Step five — Proofread and feedback
Before launching your personal website, it’s better to have someone to proofread or give some feedback. They may have some insights that will help to increase your personal website.
Step six — It’s time to shine
The final step is to map your domain name to the hosting. When you have everything ready, it’s time to let the world (LinkedIn, Tweeter to Facebook) know about your “child” — brag about it as much as you want. You deserve it.
One lesson that I learned is that people usually don’t know what you can do until you tell or show them.
Final step — keep improving
Never satisfied with your current achievements. Especially in the technology world, when you stop learning or improving, you will have a hard time to catch up.
P/S: I'm working on a project that can get articles from DEV.TO (Thanks DEV.TO team) and show them on my personal website, so I don't have to create one. Here is the working product: https://dalenguyen.me/blog. I will post another article that explains how I do it later. So stay tuned ;)
