A Personal Website is like your own Digital Namecard. Not only does it showcase who you are, it is also a matter of putting yourself out there and branding yourself. Nothing says more than telling people: “Hi, Google Desmond Ng and you will find me”.

Some famous celebrities have their own website with their own name as a domain name. It also serves as their public biography as well as to showcase the happenings in their lives.

STEPS TO GET YOUR AWESOME PERSONAL WEBSITE:

Choose a Domain Name

Essentially, this is where it matters. Having a good domain name is cool, but a GREAT domain name is what stays. Since it is a personal site, chances are you will use your own personal name to carve out a brand. At the same time, Choosing the extension is important too. Let’s look at a few examples of how extension can help:

Full Name Before the Extension such as www.neilpatel.com or www.adamhartwig.co.uk

Name and your Designation to tell the user what you do: www.anthonydesigner.com (His name is Anthony and he is a Designer)

Or using the Extension as part of your name: www.julia.na (Her name is Juliana Rotich) or desmond.ng (Yes, it’s mine and coming soon!)Choosing the domain name is important because you have to talk into account of the email address that you are allowing people to contact you. For example on this website, our contact email is using the prefix of search.engine and ends with optimization.my so that when it combines, It is easier for people to remember. A few other examples are [email protected] or [email protected]

Find the right Hosting Provider

This shouldn’t be too hard. Hosting Providers are essentially the place where you store all your online data, you “plot of land” for your virtual house. There are quite a few choices of hosting provider that you can choose from, either from Managed or Unmanaged (prices vary).

What you need to be concerned is how high are you expecting in terms of traffic (hey, you gotta start somewhere) and if it is easy to scale later.

We suggest starting with VPS such as Vultr instead of Shared Hosting because it is more secure, and your website speed will definitely load faster.

Select your CMS

There is an abundance of choice for Content Management System (CMS) or Website Builder around. If you do not wish to be troubled with hosting issue, you can go with Website Builders like Simvoly, Square, Weebly or even Wix. They are great website builders, especially for graphical websites. However, since these are managed builders, there might be some restrictions in terms of functionalities that they offer, so check each of them out (they offer free trials) before deciding on it.

If you wish to choose a more manual setup, you can consider WordPress as your CMS. A lot of settings and functionalities to tinker around, and you have a huge community to help out if required (Optimization.my supports WordPress too)

Your Content

Finally, the gist of the website. It’s time to showcase what are your best achievements as well as works are done. Use this part to communicate with viewers. A great content goes a long way in building up credibility, but don’t stuff it all up with words. Include some personal photos for that extra personal touch.