Yesterday I recommended that if you are just starting out creating a personal website that you try Blogger. Today you’re back to read more and and see if I recommend anything else, but mostly just to tell me you’re confused.
Why would a designer recommend a free option?
Great question. Why would a designer recommend a free option?
Because I really don’t want you to have a crappy website, even if you can’t afford (or think you can’t afford) a nice one. And there are options out there that will lead straight to crappy. (MySpace, anyone? LiveJournal? Though LiveJournal is marginally less crappy.)
And even more dangerous than the free offerings are the low-cost or built-in DIY options that come with many web hosting plans. They use SiteBuilder (a real thing) or EazyHTML (I made that one up) and they’re usually just awful. Trust me, you will not be happy with what these offerings are able to make. And you will have made the designer you will eventually hire miserable because they will have to extract the nuggets of your content from the unsavory slurry of execrable code.
Repeat after me: no crappy websites.
You’re a person. You want a website. Where do you start?
If you just want to get started now, and your focus is really on what you have to say (or figuring out what that is), and you’re not if sure this is something you want to spend money on, but on the other hand, you don’t want it to suck — then my honest-to-gosh best recommendation for you is start with Blogger.
Blogger? Really? Why?
Blogger is dead-simple. It’s also relatively well-coded*. A-list designers like Douglas Bowman contributed some of the themes. You can look at a Blogger site and your eyes won’t bleed.
Blogger sites are legible and findable. Sure there’s an ad above the banner at the top, but it’s minimal.
Blogger also lets you leave it gracefully behind when you’ve outgrown it. You can export your content and import it into something a bit more customizable and sophisticated, like WordPress.
What if I want it to be more personal? More customized?
Stay tuned. I have a lot more to say on this topic.
by Lisa on April 20, 2009
Oh-my-gosh, Colleen Wainwright (Communicatrix) highlighted my Blockbusters and Balancing Acts in the sidebar of the January issue of her Non-Sucky Newsletter. To wit:
WRITING TIPS OF THE MONTH
I stumbled on the marvelous site of marvelous designer-slash-writer (hey…why does that sound familiar to me, I wonder?) Lisa Firke…. While we all know that the perfect is the enemy of the good … and that the secret to getting anything done, ultimately, is in actually doing it, sometimes it’s nice to have a few new ways to mix it up.
Lisa has crafted a little section with a number of nice kickstarts for writers—and hey, everyone’s a writer sometime, right? Some of Lisa’s ways may be new to and some may not, but boy, does she have an electric way of putting things across. It alone may motivate you to get to it; if not, you could find far worse ways to spend a few moments than reading more great writing.
I love reading Colleen’s stuff—it’s a seriously thoughtful mix of high-and-low comedy and comedy of manners, tragicomedy and tour-de-force semi-serious farce–well, go read for yourself and you’ll get the idea.
