The Ultimate Guide To Building A Personal Website
Tags: productivity, personal, webdev
Published: 2020-06-28 10:16:13

What’s the #1 networking tool you can have in your arsenal as a student or a professional? I’ll tell you this right now: **it isn’t your resume**. 

Resumes are boring. College and career experts will tell you to make your resume of one page, size 12 Time New Roman document printed in black and white with no pictures. 
Seriously? How are you supposed to represent and differentiate yourself with that? 

Plus, your resume becomes static and outdated the moment you hand it to someone. You can’t update resumes you’ve already given out – you have to make new copies.

That’s why you need to create a personal website.

A website is the complete opposite of a resume. Everything bad about resumes can be fixed simply by having a website. I’d go as far as to say that not having a website in 2020 is like shooting yourself in the foot – it’s that useful.

Plus, having a **website makes you more findable.**

Let's get this straight!
Nowadays anyone and everyone can build a website, be it coming from a coding background or not,
There are many online website builders which are purely dragged and drop and don't require almost any knowledge of coding like:
 * [Wordpress](https://wordpress.com/)- Which basically works on themes, and there are many free themes for every genre, its petty simple drag and drop thing. Combined with various plugins like Elementor builder it's very easy to make a website.
 * [Wix](https://www.wix.com/)- Wix offers an excellent drag-and-drop site builder to create small websites. There are 100s of free templates available. Wix provides its own web hosting as well as domain names (free and paid). The App Market makes it easy to add extra functionality such as photo galleries or e-commerce.

Also,
If you have a little knowledge of coding you can refer any of the frontend frameworks for building your website 
([Which one you should use](https://dev.to/theankitsinha/what-is-a-web-framework-and-which-one-you-should-use-hnb))
 
Now comes the part How much I should pay?
Mostly new developers have a small budget. Lucky you, this blog is budgeted for anywhere from nothing to 25 USD.

## **What all you need?**

### **Domain**
The first step to building your personal site is to choose how you’re going to have it hosted. There are several ways to put up a website. For instance, you could just create a free blog at Wix or WordPress.com.

However, I believe it’s a lot more impressive to have a self-hosted site with an actual domain name (not a subdomain). This will look a lot more legitimate and will show that you’ve taken the time to learn how to build a website, which can differentiate you from the crowd.
What makes a good domain name?
For a personal website or portfolio, I’d recommend making your domain name your **first name+ your last name.com.**  That’s seriously the best option for memorability and SEO (aka how high you show up in Google which searched).

####Domain Registrars:
* [Freenom](https://www.freenom.com/)
 * Domain Extensions - .tk,.ml,cf
 * Free Domain for 1 year

* [Namecheap](https://www.namecheap.com/)
 * Domain Extensions - .in,.com,org,etc
 * Price range 1$- 10$

* [Namecheap](https://www.namecheap.com/)
 * Domain Extensions - .in,.com,org,etc
 * Price range 1$- 10$

* [Hostinger](https://www.hostinger.in/)
 * Domain Extensions - .in,.com,org,etc
 * Price range 1$- 10$

**How to get the best deal:** I would suggest at least watch for three days, the prices of domain vary almost every day, also it might be cheaper at early morning, and if you are buying domain+hosting you can get crazy discount codes, even you can get a free domain when you buy hosting+domain from [Hostinger](https://www.hostinger.in/)

### **Website Hosting**
There are several hosts to pick from, and some are not free.
Hosting a website is placing all your website files on a server where you can access it via IP address or URL.

After you have hosted your website it's important to change your DNS(Domain name System) in domain provider.

####Hosting Providers:
* [InfinityFree](https://infinityfree.net/)
 * 3 free hosting
 * Free Hosting for 1 year

* [Heroku](https://www.heroku.com/)
 * 3 free hosting
 * Free Hosting for 1 year

* [GitHub Pages](https://pages.github.com/)
 * Free Hosting

* [Hostinger](https://www.hostinger.in/)
 * Price range 10$- 20$

* [Godaddy](https://in.godaddy.com/)
 * Price range 15$- 20$


**How to get the best deal:** I would recommend if you are going with a paid hosting, Watch for Hostinger hosting usually when purchasing domain+hosting they give lifetime SSL for free.

### **SSL**
When purchasing a domain/hosting you can also purchase SSL for like 3$-5$.
But you can also get Free SSL from :
* [Cloudflare](https://www.cloudflare.com/)
* [LetsEncrypt](https://letsencrypt.org/)

For Starting, SSL and Email providers are not required,
But Domain and housing a website is a must!

## **Make Your Website Even Better(Optional)**

The purpose of this blog was to get you from zero to having a working website as easily as possible. However, you can do so much more to optimize your site’s design, speed, SEO, security, navigation, typography… your options are endless.

That’s why I want to show you some of the things you can do to take your site to the next level.

### **Personal Website SEO**
Making Sure You Show Up in Google Searches

This brings us to the topic of Search Engine Optimization or SEO. Now, I’m going to be honest – SEO can be a complex business. After all, we’re talking about trying to make our websites look good to a mindbogglingly complicated algorithm, which has details that Google keeps closely guarded. Oh, and of course, millions upon millions of other sites are trying to do the same thing.

The good news is that Google’s algorithm (as well as the algorithms of other search engines) has gotten much, much better over time. Its mission has always been to serve up the most relevant results for what a person searches, and it’s gotten pretty good at doing that.

It’s also a lot faster at indexing new sites that pop up. when I started building websites, I remember having to manually submit them to search engines and then sometimes wait months to see them show up. Now, Google will index your site automatically – often in just a couple of days.

What I’m going to recommend is a set of three simple steps, which can each have a big impact:

* Have the right content on your site
* Get links from other authoritative and highly-trafficked sites
* Make sure your site is mobile-friendly

Let’s start with your website’s content. The main way that Google figures out what’s on your site – and hence how relevant it is to a person’s search terms – is pretty simple: It reads your site! Google uses small pieces of code called spiders to **“crawl”** the content of the internet and index it.

Secondly, you need to understand the role that links from other sites play in your own site’s ranking. To put it simply, your site will rank more highly when it has:

* Links from a lot of sites (if they’re gotten legitimately – not in paid or spammy ways)
* Links from authoritative sites (typical sites with either a lot of traffic or sites run by institutions like governments or universities)

Lastly, I do want to mention that **Google puts a high priority on mobile-friendliness.**

More than 50% of internet traffic now comes from cell phones and mobile devices, and Google has taken notice. 




If you need any help, you can contact me. I’ll either help you directly or point you to people or resources that can be of assistance. 
You can also just connect with me on [theankitsinha.com](https://theankitsinha.in/) without a need for help.
I’d love to meet you! 💓
Also, Do comment if you like this post! And if you have a personal website I would love to have a look! 🌟

##Good Luck!