I set up my site! You can check it out here. I’ve run a couple of web pages before, and they’re quite fun when it comes to freedoms of setup and personalization, but unfortunately, they are also much less advertised than a hosted page — that is, if you want your page to get noticed without telling every individual person you know, you’ll have to do your own advertising. On Instagram, on the other hand, there is an established group of users, and there is a set up search and recommend system that can introduce new users to your page if it thinks your content fits. At the same time, sites like that pay and use their popularity to show up higher in search results, so if your page is on a social media or hosting site, it is likely that you will get more hits on your page that way unless you choose to self-promote. It’s also much easier to set up your page, since with many social medias, you have very little in terms of page setup choices.
With that said, one benefit of a personal site is creative freedom and another is content-ownership, since many social medias actually claim ownership of photography and such that is posted on them. Many people use personal sites as personal stores (where there is no other store owner who takes a cut of profits) or to promote their business (on a business card, a site of your own can look good). Personally, I have used a personal site for things like sharing and publicly showing off my creative work, organizing it into collections and providing visuals that just wouldn’t look as good or have as many customization options on a Google Doc or some other informal sharing method. I also created a sort of forum for discussion and public work on some wordbuilding I had been doing, at one point. I don’t know much about WordPress specifically, but I think it has a lot of options for professional and creative uses, as well as academic or travel and many others.
Install was pretty straightforward, and since I have gone through this type of process before and WordPress is actually more intuitive than some platforms I have used, I didn’t have many problems. I had everything all done pretty fast!
Thanks for reading! -Kelly_H
I really like the design of your website! I also think a forum for discussion is a great idea. The website can store all the debates you have in the forum, which may be a valuable resource in the future.
Hi Kelly, I love how you designed your front page of your website! The animated words really capture my attention. I’m curious how you did that! I can’t believe that you said you don’t know about WordPress, when you made this amazing front page. Love it!
I have to clear this up! The design is a theme from WordPress, definitely not my own work, but I’m glad you liked my selection, haha. If only I could make something like that!