By Ethan Short
Hey, if you are software engineer like me, in the market for a personal website, where do you start? UNFINISHED POST DEPLOYED FOR TESTING
The Options
Before I get to how I built my website, I want to go over what the different options there are. There are a lot of them, and a lot of good options.
- Website Builders
- Use a halfway hosting approach like WordPress.
- Build it yourself.
Website Builders:
Let's start with the easiest way, and if you are not super savvy with making websites, the most common. There are a lot of them, and this isn't a deep dive into website builders because I don't think this is the best way for most people to build a website. The prices also change very often so please do some of your own research to determine exact pricing.
Wix
Free plan available (shows ads)
Paid starts at ~$17/month (Core plan)
Good for design flexibility
Squarespace
No free plan
Starts at $16/month (Personal plan, billed annually)
Stylish templates, all-in-one platform
Weebly
Free plan available
Paid starts around $10–12/month
Simple to use, limited design options
Hostinger Website Builder
No free plan
Starts at $2.99/month (Premium plan)
Includes free domain, AI tools
Great value for personal sites
WordPress.com
Free plan available (shows ads)
Paid starts at $4/month (annual billing)
Popular and customizable
Webnode
Free plan available
Paid plans vary (~$4–12/month)
Easy setup, basic templates
Jimdo
Free plan available
Paid plans from ~$9/month
Focus on fast, simple sites
Adobe Portfolio
No standalone free version
Included in Adobe Creative Cloud (~$13/month)
Best for portfolios if you already use Photoshop/Lightroom
Use a halfway hosting approach like WordPress.com.
You may have noticed that I also included WordPress.com
Build it yourself
Now it's time for the main show, why over all of the other options above, you should go with something different, here is what I chose to do and why. I am not affiliated in any way with the following software and companies.
NameCheap
A good first place to start is where do I buy my domain. By no means is this the only good place to start, but it is where I did, when I had a university web-server I bought a domain that simply directed to my university static web server, which is a great way to get familiar with DNS operations and how to use something like NameCheap, which by the way is one of the best ones out there.
NameCheap is simply a great way to buy a domain. Your domain provider should depend on the exact domain you are buying and pro tip, look at deals from other providers, but NameCheap is a great way to buy a domain for the cheapest I could find it, with no disadvantages I have found thus far.
Netlify
Now that you have a domain name, we can move on to the next step. How do I host it?
If I were a purest I would recommend hosting a server on your own physical hardware. This is something I have done many times and would highly recommend for the experience, it is truly invaluable. The downsides of doing this are truly huge and for a personal website, I assure you is not worth the cost and the pain of managing your own server. So, if you don't want to manage your own physical server what are the others options? The two options I deployed are Vercel and Netlify. It is worth noting that NameCheap also offers inexpensive hosting, which I think could be a good option. Vercel and Netlify are very similar and the great thing about both of them have incredible free options that are both very extensive and have payed tiers that are very scalable for website that will have larger traffic, which is likely not your personal website.
I chose Netlify both because the interface with better in my opinion and automatic deployment and integration with Astro, which I will get to later
Sanity
What is Sanity? Sanity is a blog / admin management platform to sit between you the developer and people who need to change content on your website.
Astro
Design
What are the things I should focus on with my website?