Why Personal Websites are Important

If you're a business or provide any sort of professional services, it seems obvious you should have your own website. But even if you're just a random person on the internet, you should absolutely have a website as well. Having a website means having a piece of the internet to call your own where you can post your resume or projects or writing or photos or videos or... whatever nonsense you feel like.

Stand Out
Literally everyone and their grandma's dog is on social media, but those who have their own website (professional or personal) really stand out. Social media profiles should augment your website existing as extensions rather than be the sole home of your digital identity. Having a website not only establishes legitimacy to a business, but it can also establish credibility on an individual basis. You're a real person and you stand out from the rest of the herd.

Don't Depend on Companies
Companies come and go. Your social media profile could be shutdown or you can lose access at any time, while a website is long term. Google+ and Vine were once things and the day could very well come when Twitter and Facebook are relics from the past. In some cases, your account could be terminated if you violated some obscure or arbitrary rule on the platform, or you could be hacked for one reason or another. Anyone who has experience with this knows how insanely difficult to get in touch with someone from the platform that can help you regain access (pro-tip: use 2 factor authentication on ALL of your accounts and have offline backups of the important stuff). I'm not saying you need to completely disconnect from social media platforms as they can still serve a purpose for engagement, but in my view directing people to your website is ideal.

Personalization
Remember the days of MySpace? If you're a zoomer you may not, but back then we were able to customize the look and feel of our MySpace page. In fact, a lot of the HTML I've learned was simply a result of tinkering with the code on my MySpace page. Nowadays, you're limited in terms of customization on social media outside of updating a banner or profile picture. Having your own website gives you back that ability to customize your personal page but to an even greater level! Hell, you don't even need to understand anything about web design since WordPress can do it all for you. It's my view that minimalist web design is the most aesthetically pleasing, but if you really wanted to you could cover your site with early-2000's GIFs.

Learn Something new
And finally, there's also the side benefit of leaning a new skill. I am by no means a web developer, but the more you learn the better your skill-set becomes. If anything, tinkering with the few websites I own has made me more interested in web development. If you want to get started, I've set up several websites with Namecheap's EasyWP service and it's cheap especially if you go with a TLD like .xyz. Alternatively, Weebly and Wix are even more beginner friendly.

Your website should be the primary place where all of the stuff you create goes. It should be THE place for people to find and communicate with you.