Riding the Digital Wave: The Power of Your Personal Website

And some helpful tips on how to create one free

Nov 17, 2023

Hello humans!

Welcome back to issue #4 of Waves and Code weekly 😄.

This week’s feature focuses on why you need a personal website. I’ve iterated through several implementations over the years using various platforms and/or frameworks. However, I’d like to share a free low-code option that I’ve found and use.

My Personal Website Journey

I first started toying with a personal website in 2019. It began as a tutorial project which I used to understand the Ruby programming language and learn about the static site generator Jekyll. I enjoyed having my own little piece of real estate on the internet and soon began continuously improving and changing it.

Why you need a personal website?

Online presence: In an ever-evolving digital world a personal website provides you with an online presence that is truly your own. You have the ability to fully control the content and presentation unlike on social media platforms.
Personal branding: Due to having infinite personalization options, you have a powerful tool to develop a personal brand that makes you stand out from others in your professional career.
Networking: You can treat your website as a central hub for people to learn about you and get in touch. At your next networking event, your website becomes your new digital companion instead of a business card.
Showcase your technical ability: A personal website can act as a portfolio to display your work and technical ability. You have the freedom to continuously evolve this space so let it grow with you and showcase your capabilities.
Data & analytics: In combination with Google Analytics, your website can be a useful resource to give you an idea of the type of people who are engaging with you and your brand.

Things to consider when creating a website…

Personally, over the various iterations of my website, I have found 3 considerations to play the biggest role in my decision:

Aesthetics: You want your space to look good and be something you feel proud to show off.
Cost: This is a personal website at the end of the day and it isn’t bringing in any revenue. Find a balance between what you pay to get your website live versus the value that your website is bringing to you.
Ease of editing: You want your website to do the work for you and not become a time sync. Figure out how often you will be adding or changing content on your site and choose a solution that does not require excessive work.

My current solution…

My current website implementation checks all of these 3 boxes mentioned above.

It provides me with:

Aesthetics ✅ : Clean and minimalistic like that of notion.so (which I really like).
Cost ✅ : My hosting is free whilst still allowing me a custom domain which makes sense as my website is just an informative landing page that does not bring me any revenue.
Editing ✅ : Editing or updating my site involves no code changes or deploys and reflects on my website almost instantly.

My implementation uses a combination of notion.so, Fruition and Cloudflare to serve a Notion page as a website on my own custom domain (divashengovender.com). I’ve created an easy-to-follow step-by-step guide that will allow you to do the same.

Waves & Code

How I built my website using Notion for Free (with a Custom Domain)

Overview: This guide walks you through setting up a free website using Notion with low to no code. The code used in this guide is all autogenerated and will only require you to copy and paste it. There are 4 parts to this guide: #1. Creating your public Notion page that will become your website…

2 years ago · 3 likes

Adventures: Summer = Extra Long Surf Sessions! ☀️

I’ve always been a lover of the sun and summer so my heart couldn’t be happier right now. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, there has been a steady increase in temperature and the sun is going down later and later 🤩. This means more opportunities for sunset surfs after work and I couldn’t be happier!!!

Here is a photo of the gorgeous sunset from one of my sunset surf sessions. I’m looking forward to many many more in the coming months.

Unfiltered shot from a sunset surf session

Favorites this week ⭐

Website: poe.com
An interesting service developed by Quora. It allows you to interact with a range of AI chatbots including GPT, StableDiffusion, DALL-E, and many more.
Browser: Arc Browser
I’ve made the change from Chrome to Arc Browser and don’t think I’ll ever be going back. Arc is a Chromium-based browser that aims to remove the clutter from your browsing experience whilst providing subtle features you never knew you needed. Try it out with this invite - Try Arc Browser.
Website: Hugging Face
An open-source platform where the machine learning community collaborates on models, datasets, and applications. Think of it as “the Github of ML models” that allows you to pull trained models and play with them. I’m looking forward to tinkering with this one!

Thanks for hanging around for issue #4 of Waves & Code! I hope diving into the world of personal websites gave you some ideas for your own digital space. Your thoughts on websites, coding capers, or even your own digital journey are pure gold. Let's chat and shape this community together!