Why You Should Have Your Own Website

Originally Posted 1/26/24; Updated 10/1/24

So, I've realized I've talked about this other places, but not here yet. In this post, I want to try to explain why I think more people (especially creative people), should have their own websites.

Why would I want my own website?

One thing that I think has been made abundantly clear with the Twitter takeover, but also with how many things Google kills off is that no matter how well something is liked, it's possible at any moment for a company to simply get rid of whatever is on their site. This might be because it goes against their terms and services, or just might be because the site is shutting down. Even if it's not the company shutting down the site, the site might grow to a point where you no longer want to be on the site - it's no longer a place you feel comfortable or want to spend your time.

(A quick side bar: this sort of problem also is the reason I've started self hosting a lot of things or moving away from streaming services and back to things like physical media - it's a horrible feeling when a company sort of pulls the rug out from you unexpectedly. That's part of the reason I try to write about services I use here, in case other people also finds it interesting.)

Anyways, when you feel the need to get off a site where you felt like you either had followers or just felt like you made some good posts, this now creates a problem (at least, if you're like me). Whenever you transfer where you are (as an artist in particular, but also in general), you lose followers. Not everyone will follow you from one platform to another. On top of this, if you're deciding to delete your account or the website itself is shutting down, you're going to lose everything you've posted. So, if this has been the only site you've been posting your art to, it's now all gone.

Having your own dedicated website means you have a place where you can post whatever you want, and it'll never go away (well, for as long as you're paying for the sites). This not only will give you peace of mind, but any dedicated follower/ reader will now have a place they know they can get updates about you and your projects from, should something ever happen where they follow you. Also, sites like Wordpress and I imagine other major site builders have RSS feed functionality, giving users another way to follow you. I talk a bit more about what RSS feeds are here

Okay, but how would I get started?

Well first you're going to need to find a website builder. You can also code your own website, but unless that's something that specifically interests you, it's much simpler to go with a website builder. The one I like the most, and what this website is built on, is called Wordpress.

(Note: There is a wordpress.com and a wordpress.org. If my memory serves, wordpress.org is more for businesses and self hosting, and wordpress.com is more for consumers. I personally find Wordpress really easy to use, and have been using it for many years at this point.)

Update 2/27/24: I just learned from this article that wordpress is going to start scraping users data to help train AI. I've disabled this for now on my site, but usually once this process starts I don't really trust the company to stick by allowing an opt out for long. I'm going to start trying to look for an alternative that I like.

Update 3/9/24: The solution I came to was coding my own site and hosting through Neocities.

Another very popular option is Squarespace. Squarespace I personally dislike because I feel it's almost too simple to use. For me it feels so simple that it's restrictive of things I'd like to do with my website. That said, there are plenty of other people who absolutely love Squarespace and what it has to offer, so it might be the right choice for you.

One other popular option I see is Wix. I don't think I've ever touched Wix before personally, so have very little knowledge of it.

Update 10/1/24: I recently learned of a basic website builder called Bear Blog. If you're interested in blogging, this seems like it'd be the easiest way to do it. It uses markdown to post, which is pretty easy to pick up. It also comes with built in RSS feeds.

I'm pretty sure all of these sites offer a free version or trial period, so I'd suggest trying all of them out and seeing which back end you like the most. You can even just keep your site as a free site (at least, with Wordpress) which I believe just makes it so your website ends with ".wordpress.com" as well as they'll put ads on your site. I'm not sure exactly what it looks like with the other website builders, but typically you can design a site before paying for anything.

You mentioned a cost?

Yeah so another reason I think everyone should have their own site is it's relatively cheap. This site, for example, costs me $48/ year for the website itself, and then an additional $19/year for the domain (tanzi-media.com). So a total cost of $67/ year, or about $5.59/ month.

Update 3/9/24: Neocities cost $5/ Month and the domain itself is still about $19.99/ year.

An issue starts to arise if you post a lot of high quality images. Depending on exactly how much you post, you might start running into storage limits on the different site builders. There are ways around this - you could try to host your images on other places (like google drive or imgur) and then embed them on your site. This might take some coding know how to do well, or additional costs again depending on how big of files. Alternatively, you could also just post slightly lower resolution images on your site, and keep the extremely high res ones for if people want to purchase them or something. Most social media sites compress high quality photos anyways, so this wouldn't be much of a change from what people are used to. At the time of writing this, my wordpress site has 6 GB of storage, and I'm using less than 10% of that. As you can see, this site has plenty of photos and so you honestly might be fine for a long time.

Videos eat up a lot of space, and honestly I wouldn't really suggest posting anything longer than a couple of seconds (and even that can be dicey) to your website directly. Something like YouTube might be the better option, and then embed that on whatever page or post you want. Of course, you run the risk of YouTube taking down your content or disappearing (which is what we've been trying to avoid with all of this to begin with), however given how expensive it is to host video content, there isn't much else available that I know of.

If you're like me and at this point mostly just do blog posts, almost any amount of storage is enough because these files take up barely any storage on the website builders servers.

Conclusion

As mentioned above, I think some of the biggest reasons to have your own site is to just have a place to post whatever you want and know that it'll be there for as long as you want it to be. If you're someone who's trying to grow an audience, it also gives you a solid place to fall back to if any of the social media sites you're on goes down. It also allows people to interact with you and follow your work in different ways, again kind of providing security that if something were to happen on social media, they could still find you. Or maybe they want to get off a certain site, but don't want to miss your content. Now they can still interact with it.

It's also one of those things that is free to play with, so you might as well give it a shot! Personally I also think it makes for a better internet experience than social media sites, especially when websites support RSS feeds. I want to leave this here, as this person talks about how the web can feel sort of small now a days that I think is interesting. I think a good way to help make the web a more interesting place again is to have more people talking about things that interest them, on websites other people can reference and talk about more. (Like, look at this site I found. Just a person talking about broadcast towers. How cool is that?)