Why You Should Have a Website – and How To Do It

You should have a website. You have something to share that only you can share, something that other people can enjoy, learn from, and be entertained by: your life.

Most people that I tell this to laugh and tell me that they can’t think of anything to put on a website. This is because a lot of the personal webpages out there aren’t very helpful or even very interesting: some poorly designed page with blinking tags and silly animations with very little to say and a few pictures of dogs and cats and the webmaster at various parties. Most people are afraid of falling into this mode, and justifiably so.

But most people don’t realize the really great stuff that they have to share: it’s not (necessarily) their pictures of their dog or their cat or what kind of ice cream they like: most people who don’t know you really don’t care and can’t get anything out of that. Instead, think back on the things that you have done. Maybe you’ve written poetry about your garden. Maybe you’ve done some pencilled sketches of a tree-filled horizon. Maybe you play a little guitar on the side. Maybe you’ve picked up a thing or two about carpentry. All of these things represent valuable contributions that you could make to the rest of mankind.

Share them! Type in your poems! Borrow a friend’s scanner to scan in your pictures and paintings and sketches — and record that groovy guitar lick you just came up with. Write a little piece on the correct way to dovetail on a clothes bureau or that nifty recipe you have for walnut cookies.

Now putting it on a website doesn’t mean it will be read by millions.

Maybe only a handful of people will, and most of those even will be your friends and family. but in the process of realizing what you have to share and expressing that, you will have enriched yourself. And those handful of people who came to your page will be that much more edified about the world. And who knows? Maybe your page will be read by thousands of people a day! But don’t start with this mentality or you’ll get caught up in the (false) enormity of it all.

So now I hope I’ve got you pumped up to make a page. How should you go about doing it?