Ask HN: Best Way to Create a Clean Personal Website?

17 points by jsanford9292 6 years ago | 9 comments

I am working on a project and I would like to write an article about it when it's finished.

I thought about posting to Medium but since I have noticed Medium limiting the articles I can read each month, I don't think I want another company to control my writing.

Thus personal website.

What is the best way to make a simple personal website for a beginner/intermediate programmer? Want to spend 2-3 days on it max. And I don't want to use company-owned software such as Squarespace (those websites look weird anyways).

Here are examples I would like to emulate:

https://www.dannysalzman.com/

https://blog.jldc.me/

For reference, I have ~1 year of programming experience and have built iPhone apps in Swift and I have also completed some projects in Python.

What is the best way to quickly spin up a clean personal website that I have control over?

Thanks!

quickthrower2 6 years ago |

I’d try a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll if I were you. Then host for free on netlify which takes care of build/deploy/hosting and DNS for free. I think you’d need an hour or so for the basics and another couple of hours to customise to your tastes.

10kresistor 6 years ago |

In my experience this never ends up being worth it. If you use a template people will complain you didn't design it yourself. If you don't use a template people will complain that it doesn't look professional. Rarely will anyone actually dig into your projects and take a look at them. You'll likely spend a lot of time creating a build system that no one will ever know or care about. The whole site will basically just be used to criticize you. Most HR workers won't even look at the site. Remember all they are capable of doing is looking for keywords on a resume. Plus no matter how fantastic your site is if you say something that they don't agree with that will actually count as a negative on you.

another thing to think about is you probably don't have as much content as you think you do. Ultimately your personal site is just going to be a kind of portfolio so if you don't have a lot of personal work that you can show the site's not going to look very good.

My advice is not to build it. Don't build a website. Don't build a single page app. Don't build a simple static page. Don't do anything other than hone your resume because that's all that matters to hr drones.

DarrenDev 6 years ago |

You could try Wordpress.com, then import each story / post to Medium to attract the larger audience. This gives you control over your content on your own blog, and the potential of the larger audience on Medium.

Wordpress.com isn't mentioned often here on Hacker News (been around too long maybe), but if you want to avoid spending time on setup and maintenance, it's an ideal solution with some good off-the-shelf themes.

Not free though, but not pricey either.

deca6cda37d0 6 years ago |

https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish

taigeair 6 years ago |

How about https://pages.github.com/ ?

sarcasmatwork 6 years ago |

If I understand what your asking for, its a bootstrap template. Clone/download and customize to your liking etc.

Search github for these. Found a few a quick search:

https://github.com/BuckyMaler/Fitness https://github.com/hayanisaid/bootstrap4-website https://github.com/RyanFitzgerald/devportfolio

I'm not sure if I have to say, but then spin up a VPS and host it.... Get a domain name etc..

seddin 6 years ago |

Hugo is a great way to create a simple blog, there is a lot of themes for your linking and it is also quite easy to create custom themes for it.

https://gohugo.io/

zicsus 6 years ago |

Your example sites a simple and basic in design, so some simple html and css would be fine. You can host this simply on Netlify for free. If you want those articles to come from a database than your python knowledge can be helpful. Use django or flask to create a server.

ftio 6 years ago |

I wrote a post about how to make a good, clean website on my...clean website.

TL;DR: Don’t worry about it. Just write.

For more: https://www.ft.io/blog/good-website/