Why have your own website?
For starters, you will have full control over how it looks and what you can put on it.
Assuming you're not using some crappy website builder, styling your website won't be locked behind a bunch of microtransactions and/or a monthly subscription.
You also likely won't ever have to worry about getting banned for arbitrary reasons if you manage the website entirely by yourself.
That's nice, but how do I get started?
Getting started: the hosting
To have your own website, you need to a place to publish it online first.
There are plenty of free options that not only let you have a website but also use it with a domain name, with all the bells and whistles included.
For example, you can use GitHub Pages or its equivalents on other Git hosting websites (like GitLab Pages and Codeberg Pages).
I'm not going to explain too much how they work, since I think it's not insanely difficult to figure out.
Making your website
You don't need fancy software to make a website.
A single index.html file with some CSS (for styling) in it can be a website.
Make it in a text editor like Notepad++, write and save some HTML, open the file in your browser to check it, repeat. MDN Web Docs and W3Schools are both good places to look things up as you go.
If your website has lots of pages, hand-writing HTML for everything might get a little tedious. You can use a static site generator (e.g. Jekyll) in that case: it takes a folder of Markdown files and spits out a folder of HTML you can upload as-is.
But maybe you don't want to learn all that to just make a webpage. An LLM can make the files you need if that's more your cup of tea.
I would still recommend that you get familiar with HTML and CSS since it really helps making your website look "just right".
The extras
If you don't want the equivalent of an old hotmail address as your website URL, you should get yourself a domain name.
With a domain name, your website won't have to be on a random subdomain anymore and it'll be easier to remember it.
A custom domain costs around 15$ a year from a registrar like Porkbun or Namecheap. Once you've got one, all you'll need to do is set up its DNS records.
A DNS record is just an entry that tells the internet where your domain should go to. For a static site you'll usually deal with two types of records:
- An A record, which points your domain (
example.com) at a server's IP address so you don't have to type it manually. - A CNAME record, which points a subdomain (like
www.example.com) at another domain name instead of an IP.
That's it, really. Just those three steps should be more than enough to have a nice website that you actually own.