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How to build your own personal website for free

10 Nov 2020 - Misc

In this post, I will share how I build my personal website (and how you can build yours!):

The most important tools are:

• Hosting: GitHub Page
• Blogging: Jekyll
• Subscribing: Mailchimp
• Commenting: Discuq
• Indexing with Google

This post serves more as a roadmap, instead of a step-by-step tutorial for your reference. The official websites of the tools I used give pretty clear and most up-to-date tutorials.

Hosting

I choose GitHub Page to host my website for the following reasons:

• It is free.
• The process is quick and simple.
• It allows me to 100% customize my website design.
• The default domain name github.io is recognizable.

With GitHub Page, you can upload your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files onto a GitHub repository, and boom, your website is published.

Each GitHub account is entitled to one website, with the domain name username.github.io, and you can also change the domain name to any domain that you own.

I started my website with an HTML and a CSS file as the front page. (You can learn more about HTML and CSS here if you haven’t.) It works perfectly well as an online resume, or a page to showcase yourself.

You can stop here if that’s enough for you.

But besides that, I also want to write blogs, recording and sharing my thoughts and learnings with the public. Blogs can also help attract traffic to my website. So let’s add a blogging function to our website.

Blogging

GitHub Page recommends Jekyll, a static site generator without any use of databases.

Your website files get organized in a structured way, while creating posts is just as simple as writing a Word/Markdown document with the help of Liquid templates.

Jekyll also supports multiple plugins like SEO tagging, RSS feed, etc. See popular plugins here.

Subscribing

People hardly go to your website periodically to check your new blogs. To notify them when you write a new blog, use a subscribing service like Mailchimp.

Register an account, copy a block of code and paste into your Liquid template, done.

When you want to notify your subscribers about your new posts, you can create a campaign in Mailchimp and customize the email message.

Commenting

I would like to know how my audience think about my articles. They can leave some comments, and I can reply to their comments.

Discuq with its a free tier plan fulfills everything I want.

To install, again embed a block of code into your Liquid template, and it is done. You can control all the comments right in the page as well as in your Discuq dashboard.

Indexing with Google

To allow others find your website through Google search, you need to index your website.

1. You can use Google Search Console to submit your website’s url, or

2. Submit your sitemap.xml (which can be generated by the plugin jekyll-sitemap)

If you want to also see the traffic of your website, you can use Google Analytics.

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That’s it. You can build your personal website with so much functionalities for completely free.

Thanks Internet and the open-source community.

Leave your comments below if you have any question, and subscribe to my blog for more posts :)

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