“Rachel always recommended messing with the settings. She said it's better than settling for whatever they give you.” -Craig Finn, “Messing With The Settings”

You should have a website

I know. You already have a social media account. But you should also have a personal website. Here's why.

You control your website

When you post on social media, you are subject to the whims of whoever runs it. If you get banned, no one knows how to find you. If the website gets sold to someone who sucks, you cannot transfer your identity somewhere else. If the main algorithm that people use to find your posts starts suppressing your posts, you have no backup plan.

Social media leaves you bouncing from one enshittified, corporate-owned app to another.

Your website is your fallback plan

When your favorite social media website gets bought by some asshole with more money than sense, you are going to be left holding the bag. If you have a website, you can link your social media profiles on the website, and build up a reputation as having that website so people know where to find you if your current social media implodes.

You will feel better if you have control over your technology

I'm a glass artist. I use a kiln about 3-5 times a week for my work. A few months ago, my thermocouple broke. I don't have a place in town that will repair kilns, and anyway, it's too heavy to move around. Luckily, kilns are meant to be user-serviced. The thermocouple popped out, I ordered a new one, and I did a little work with a screwdriver to get the new one in place. And you know what? It felt great. Because it gave me a sense of agency and control I'd been missing. This is also why people get really into baking their own bread, or fixing their own cars.

In a world where technology is deeply alienating and increasingly locked to be controlled only by experts, having agency over a machine is empowering. Being able to show your friends that you made a website feels good. And when shit hits the fan and you lose Twitter, Bluesky, Facebook, your mastodon instance, your Telegram channel, Instagram, cohost, or wherever else you make your posts, you will feel better having a place to fall back to, and if you continue with social media somewhere else, you will have a place to hang up a sign that says “find me here”.

It is worthwhile to become a bit tech literate even though it takes effort

If you don't want to learn to use technology, other people will use it for you, and they will use it to place you under their thumbs in a way that makes it as impossible to switch to something else as they can. Making a website is a great way to experiment with getting agency over your relationship with the internet, your phone, and computers.

Making Your Website

A brief note on Squarespace

A lot of companies will try to tell you that they are the only way for people who aren't comfortable with code to make a website. These people are lying to you because they want your money. If you have the money for those kinds of services and don't want to mess around too much, Squarespace and its ilk work fine, and you always have the option of moving your shit off there to somewhere else if they enshittify.

I do specifically recommend against Wix.

Getting a domain name

You will probably want a domain name for your website. The company you buy a domain name is called a registrar, and the one I use is Porkbun. Domain names come with an annual fee, but dot coms are only about $15/year. (If you want to get website verified on Bluesky, Porkbun makes that really easy; you'll only have to press a button and copy and paste some text.)

If you don't have the $15/year for a domain, I recommend Neocities. They'll give you a free subdomain (yournamegoeshere.neocities.org), which you can also use for Bluesky verification.

If all you want is a webpage that links to your current socials/clips/store/etc, Glitch in Bio is purpose built to do that and only that.

The reason to choose paying the $15/year over the Neocities/Glitch option is that if you pick Neocities/Glitch and it goes to shit, you're back on having to set yourself up all over again. If you own your domain name, you can transfer it from one registrar to another, and you can host your website from a huge number of places. But it's better than not having a website!

An eclectic assortment of resources

Okay so you want to make a website! Here's some places to start.

Extremely easy, no or low code resources

More advanced resources

In conclusion

My hope is that dipping your toe into making a website will be a first step toward having agency over your web presence and, ultimately, your relationship with technology in general. So much of the web as it is right now is social media websites that try to maximize how much time you spend looking at their ads, but it doesn't have to be that way. Making a website is a tiny way to get a little bit of that agency back. I hope yours serves you well.

Website by Nora Reed. CSS is Axist.