“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
-
KompoZer: an extremely basic WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)
website editor. This is what I use. If you want to get started making a
website that looks like this one, you can download this page, open it
in KompoZer.
-
If you aren't up for downloading KompoZer (or aren't on a computer),
Simple Page Builder is also an option. It has a really good tutorial.
-
Absolute beginner’s guide to Neocities does what it says on the tin. If
you are making a Neocities site this will walk you through the basics
of setting one up.
More advanced resources
-
Resources for keeping the web free, open, and poetic has links to
beginning with HTML and CSS
-
HTML for people is a humane introduction to building websites; it's
EXTREMELY thorough about explaining how all the fiddly bits of making a
website, from “what is a folder on my computer” onward
-
32bit.cafe will walk you through the whole process of making an
expressive, old-school style personal site.
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.