a guide to conceiving, creating & publishing your own website
Some reasons why social media is bad for you have been expressed. But what are the upsides of making a website, instead?
On your own web page, you can say whatever you want. There is no Terms of Service when you write a HTML file on your computer. (There may be a Terms of Service for your web host, but they tend to be very lax.) There is nobody stopping you from talking about your experiences without censoring yourself; there is nobody deeming your artwork too inappropriate to host; there is no opportunity to be run off of a platform, because you yourself are the platform.
There is also the matter of expression. If you enjoy making your social media profiles look pretty, you might enjoy making your website look even prettier. There is no restriction to a banner and an avatar. You can add a thousand images anywhere you want; you can change the colour of links; you can make everything Comic Sans, if you wish!
If you are an artist, photographer, writer, or anything else, you may have noticed that the websites you rely on for exposure are becoming increasingly hostile. Maybe the services you keep your work on are slowly but surely becoming defunct. Or maybe you just want something else.
With a website, your entire portfolio can be uploaded, managed and controlled by you. You can decide how it is shown and to who. Most importantly, it won't get lost.
A website is often more attractive to employers than a social media link.
Many services have a character limit of some kind. On Twitter, you are limited to a mere 280 characters for your posts. On Discord, your messages must be under 2000 characters, or 4000 if you have their paid subscription. On Instagram, it's 2200 characters.
If you have a lot of things to express, this becomes troublesome. You could learn to tighten your sentences, which is always good, but it is also not a solution.
With your own website, there is infinite vertical space. Text costs nothing as data compared to the images and videos we freely share now; if your website is text-only, you would practically have infinite server space, too.
You can write as blog posts as you wish. You can keep extremely long logs of all sorts of information. You can publish entire web-novels, if you'd like.
There is no need to worry about engagement. There are no Likes or Views unless you implement them yourself. As a result, there is no need to be pushing new updates every hour of every day.
You can update your site daily, weekly, monthly, or whenever you feel like it. You can choose to very rarely update your site, leaving it unchanging just like this one.
You can only bring new work to the table when you feel ready. You can also bring a hundred things to the table at once!
If you need a link shortener, you could find one full of ads which might also delete your links. You could also find or write a program which does the job and put it onto your own server, or create a blank page with a simple redirect line. One of these offers you much more freedom than the other.
You could also be your own list of social media links, your own image host, your own fiction archive, your own cloud storage, host your own video game mod downloads, start your own imageboard, and whatever else you can think of.
In most cases, aside from server costs, it is totally free to do these things. You could avoid paying ten subscriptions to services that you could be running yourself for very cheap, or you could add your own cute domain name to your own things, if nothing else.