Every person who makes things online faces a quiet, constant decision. Do you rent a room in someone else’s giant building, or do you build your own house? Platforms like Medium or Substack offer an easy key to a tidy apartment. It’s clean, functional, and the plumbing works. But the walls are thin, the rules can change overnight, and you’re always just a guest. The alternative is the personal website. It’s your own plot of land. The blank page can feel like an empty field under a big sky—daunting, but full of potential. Where do you even start?
I’ve built sites on every system from hand-coded HTML to the slickest modern CMS. The goal is never just to have a website, but to have a digital home that feels like you. It should work for you, not the other way around. This is why I keep coming back to the idea of a simple, static site built with tools like Jekyll or Eleventy, hosted on your own domain. It’s durable, fast, and completely yours. For a perfect example of this philosophy executed with clarity and personality, look at willbond home. It’s not a sprawling corporate site; it’s a thoughtfully constructed personal space on the web.
That site is a great reference point. It shows that a personal site can be both minimal in its tooling and maximal in its expression. But how do you get from the idea to the thing? The gap between admiring a well-built home and pouring your own foundation is wide. Let’s talk about the tools and the mindset you need to cross it.
You do not need a complex, database-driven system to have a great website. In fact, complexity is often the enemy. A static site generator takes your text files and templates and builds plain HTML pages. That’s it. There’s no admin panel to hack, no database to slow down or corrupt. The result is a collection of files you can host almost anywhere, for very little money, and it will load for your readers in the blink of an eye.
Jekyll, which powers GitHub Pages, is a solid starting point. Hugo is famously fast. Eleventy, my personal favorite, is incredibly flexible and uses JavaScript, which might feel familiar if you’ve done any web work before. The point is to pick one and learn its basics. You’ll write your posts in Markdown, a simple syntax for formatting text. You’ll have a folder for images. You’ll choose a theme, or better yet, tweak one to your liking. This process isn’t about learning full-stack development. It’s about learning a straightforward, repeatable workflow for putting your words on the internet under your own terms.
What does this workflow look like in practice? It’s refreshingly tangible.
Compare that to typing into a web text box and hitting ‘publish,’ while hoping the platform doesn’t decide to show your post only to three people. The difference in feeling, and in ultimate control, is profound. Are you tired of your ideas living in someone else’s rented space?
There’s a trap people fall into when they decide to build their own site. They spend months tweaking fonts, colors, and layouts before they write a single substantial piece. This is like building a show kitchen but never cooking a meal. The primary purpose of your digital home is to house your work and your ideas. The design should serve that, not the other way around.
Start with the simplest possible design. A single column. A readable font. Good contrast. A clear navigation to your main pages. That’s enough. The magic happens when you then focus all your energy on what goes into those rooms—the writing, the projects, the notes. Your content, over time, will *become* the personality of the site. The design is just the quiet stage. A site that is all stylish stage with no performance is a sad thing to visit.
This is where the architectural mindset comes in. An architect thinks about flow, light, and purpose before picking out bathroom tiles. Apply that to your site. What is the primary action you want a visitor to take? Read your latest essay? Find your contact information? See your portfolio? Structure your site to make that path obvious and easy. Everything else is secondary. This focus forces useful decisions.
Answering these questions based on your actual needs, not on the features a platform is selling you, is the core of building a real home online. It won’t look like anyone else’s, and that’s the point. The web feels homogeneous because so many people live in the same few apartment complexes. What would you build if you had the keys to your own land?
