How to create your own web presence
There's a million different guides to creating your own website, but what is it to create your own web presence? It's like any other web project really, which means that you need to plan for it as much as you need to execute on it. Should go without saying, but thankfully, since this is for your own satisfaction, you're allowed a lot of freedom as to how to do things.
I'm not an expert on every aspect of website building, but I've had a lot of
experience building out what appears to be one particular kind of website
that can become another in a short matter of time.
Moreover, when you're building for yourself there's the very real temptation
to drop it and just go it the easy way, just go back to Twitter or Facebook.
This is understandable; we've only got so many hours in one day and that's
where your audience might be.
But when you have the luxury of time, there are a few distinct principles that you can follow, that will benefit you in carving out your own space on the web. A lot of the techniques you'll be using to craft your site have as much relevance to professional web development as they do amateur. Take them with a grain of salt, by all means, but you might get something out of them:
- Be purposeful when determining what you want to show
- Be flexible in how you show it
- Think about who you want to show it to and what you want to tell them
- Put everything into a consistent structure
- Do the simplest thing first
- Don't try and do it all alone
- Dealing with money is hard
- Automation requires a lot of thought
- Consider the implications
WARNING: Before I start getting into this, note that it doesn't actually discuss how to build websites. This might be disappointing, but there's a lot of ground to cover even without the fiddly nature of working out how you're going to build it. I'm hoping that it might give you some ideas established well before you actually decide to start.
What do you want to document?
What do you want to document? Your life, the minutae of what interests you, other people's stuff that you find relevant to your existence, and so on. One way or another, there are patterns that encompass this stuff that become apparent, and this'll make you think about how you represent it. But, whatever you use, you should prepare yourself to work flexibly.
Say you like music. It might just be a list of all the media you have; CDs, records, tapes. From there you might want to rate them, or review them. You add a rating out of 5, or 10, find some way to represent your score, download an image of a star to embed into your site. You add a quick note as to why you liked something. For something you really liked, it becomes a couple of paragraphs. Your layout breaks, you think about adding a new page just for this album.
See how it can get complex pretty quickly?
Or, say you're involved in your community and want to link out to other
people's writing, on their own blogs or in newspapers and so on. Sometimes
you make a note of what's behind a given link, sometimes you do a short riff
on it. This sounds pretty good for a microblog, right?
Sometimes, you draw together a few links and write a longer post,
bringing forth an extended narrative. Suddenly you're saying THREAD: at
the beginning of a long series of posts which you're either copy-pasting into
your editor or writing extemporaneously. Someone else replies which derails
your train of thought and turns your 10/69 into an 11/420 or something.
That microblog or a link blog doesn't quite work for this situation, right? Unless that sort of spontaneity is actually what you wanted?
Or, perhaps you do web-based art – letting you treat the page as a canvas upon which you can pour any manner of markup, stylesheet or script. Suddenly your template-based site builder or CMS is looking a bit awkward as you try and shoehorn all this extra stuff into it, which might be used for just one page.
Why do you want to document it?
Ultimately a personal web presence tells us something about you, but beyond stroking the ego, your presence should have some kind of purpose. However, this purpose can be as rich and multifaceted or as perfunctory and ill thought out as you wish. You can go strictly for vanity if you feel like it, but the why of doing it will inform how you pull together content and make all the bits work together.
You might have a very good idea of who you think would use your site, or you might only have vague suspicions. Either way, you might be well placed to create some personas that represent your ideas of who might read your site. You might go into depth about why they're using your site. It could be as simple as:
- Grandparent
- Likes looking at photos of their grandkids
- Lot of free time
- Can't see so well
- Not that experienced with the web
From there you can discern a couple of things that'll be useful when putting your site together. In this example:
- Needs to support photos, possibly photo galleries
- Get a strategy in place to provide them with lots of photos
- User interface must be large, clear and highly visible
- Must be easy to reach the content they want
How do you want to organise it?
Once you've got an idea about what you want to discuss and who you want to discuss it with, you can think about how they might find it easiest to explore what you've got, or all the different ways they might want to organise information to make it easier for them to do things with. This means that some form of structure is needed for all your information, and this dictates what you call your pages, how you nest them, how your menu works and so on. In industry jargon, we call this information architecture (IA) and it's not just something professionals can do. Every time you put together groups of photo albums with the same subject, you're doing the same stuff as when people are building a site's IA.
A lot of the time, your IA will be tied to how you present information on your site. If you've got a lot of pets, you might structure them hierarchically:
- Pets
- Cats
- Princess
- Furby
- Dogs
- Reba
- Mr. Clean
- Captain
- Newts
- Kelvin
- Melvin
- Alvin
If you've got a lot of photo albums, you might choose to organise them by taxonomy; assigning them keywords that relate multiple albums, so you can do things like list the albums from all your trips to Disneyland in one place, as well as more straightforward things like listing them chronologically.
A lot of this stuff probably goes without saying! However, you might have some different ideas about how to structure all your content that will help people browse and use it.
Do you want to sell your stuff?
Perhaps all you want to do is show everything off. That's alright, you build your site, figure out how to structure it, and upload it. Suddenly people start asking you about some of the things you make, want to know how they can buy them. God forbid that you should end up in this sort of situation, right? Who doesn't want to be put in the position of being able to sell the stuff you make?
Suddenly your site's not so simple, you need to worry about the bear that is ecommerce. How to set up your storefront, how to arrange everything, how to handle registration, payment processors, security, PCI-DSS – people spend their entire lives trying to understand this sphere of the web and still aren't able to comprehend every little detail.
This is one of the situations where you might want to consider using an external service to handle selling things for you, whether it be sites like, say, Patreon or Gumroad or whatever. They certainly have their issues, and are not suitable for everyone, but given their focus on small independent creators, you might find yourself having an easier time than building your own.
If you feel like building your own, don't let that stop you, but unless you've established yourself as a business already, you could be in for a lot of unnecessary excitement.
How do I communicate with other websites?
Depending on how you work, you might want to have some kind of automated integration with other websites, letting them know you've linked to them and vice-versa, pulling updates in and so on. This is very much dependent on the platform you use, and might not be practical or necessary for everyone.
Nevertheless, there's a group of folks coalescing together under the IndieWeb banner that are trying to find ways to make all this rich functionality work without compromising the independence of your site.
(For what it's worth, I'm not representative of the IndieWeb in any way, shape or form. But I reckon it'd be cool to get involved. These sorts of communities form the backbone of I got involved in the web in the first place, and I hope they'll continue to empower creators and developers for a long time to come.)
Should I do this?
Obviously, consider the implications of doing things before you do them. Part of the reason why larger tech companies get pilloried in the press is that they did not examine the deeper implications of what they were implementing before they did them, whether it be in terms of pain for their users, or unnecessary overhead for themselves, or legal trouble. The aftermath of moving fast and breaking things is as much a problem for individuals doing personal things as much as it is for people whose only concern is trying to make money.
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