
Ask HN: Best Way to Create a Clean Personal Website? - jsanford9292
I am working on a project and I would like to write an article about it when it&#x27;s finished.<p>I thought about posting to Medium but since I have noticed Medium limiting the articles I can read each month, I don&#x27;t think I want another company to control my writing.<p>Thus personal website.<p>What is the best way to make a simple personal website for a beginner&#x2F;intermediate programmer? Want to spend 2-3 days on it max. And I don&#x27;t want to use company-owned software such as Squarespace (those websites look weird anyways).<p>Here are examples I would like to emulate:<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dannysalzman.com&#x2F;<p>https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.jldc.me&#x2F;<p>For reference, I have ~1 year of programming experience and have built iPhone apps in Swift and I have also completed some projects in Python.<p>What is the best way to quickly spin up a clean personal website that I have control over?<p>Thanks!
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quickthrower2
I’d try a site generator like Hugo or Jekyll if I were you. Then host for free
on netlify which takes care of build/deploy/hosting and DNS for free. I think
you’d need an hour or so for the basics and another couple of hours to
customise to your tastes.

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10kresistor
In my experience this never ends up being worth it. If you use a template
people will complain you didn't design it yourself. If you don't use a
template people will complain that it doesn't look professional. Rarely will
anyone actually dig into your projects and take a look at them. You'll likely
spend a lot of time creating a build system that no one will ever know or care
about. The whole site will basically just be used to criticize you. Most HR
workers won't even look at the site. Remember all they are capable of doing is
looking for keywords on a resume. Plus no matter how fantastic your site is if
you say something that they don't agree with that will actually count as a
negative on you.

another thing to think about is you probably don't have as much content as you
think you do. Ultimately your personal site is just going to be a kind of
portfolio so if you don't have a lot of personal work that you can show the
site's not going to look very good.

My advice is not to build it. Don't build a website. Don't build a single page
app. Don't build a simple static page. Don't do anything other than hone your
resume because that's all that matters to hr drones.

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DarrenDev
You could try Wordpress.com, then import each story / post to Medium to
attract the larger audience. This gives you control over your content on your
own blog, and the potential of the larger audience on Medium.

Wordpress.com isn't mentioned often here on Hacker News (been around too long
maybe), but if you want to avoid spending time on setup and maintenance, it's
an ideal solution with some good off-the-shelf themes.

Not free though, but not pricey either.

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deca6cda37d0
[https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish](https://github.com/JohnSundell/Publish)

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taigeair
How about [https://pages.github.com/](https://pages.github.com/) ?

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sarcasmatwork
If I understand what your asking for, its a bootstrap template. Clone/download
and customize to your liking etc.

Search github for these. Found a few a quick search:

[https://github.com/BuckyMaler/Fitness](https://github.com/BuckyMaler/Fitness)
[https://github.com/hayanisaid/bootstrap4-website](https://github.com/hayanisaid/bootstrap4-website)
[https://github.com/RyanFitzgerald/devportfolio](https://github.com/RyanFitzgerald/devportfolio)

I'm not sure if I have to say, but then spin up a VPS and host it.... Get a
domain name etc..

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seddin
Hugo is a great way to create a simple blog, there is a lot of themes for your
linking and it is also quite easy to create custom themes for it.

[https://gohugo.io/](https://gohugo.io/)

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zicsus
Your example sites a simple and basic in design, so some simple html and css
would be fine. You can host this simply on Netlify for free. If you want those
articles to come from a database than your python knowledge can be helpful.
Use django or flask to create a server.

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ftio
I wrote a post about how to make a good, clean website on my...clean website.

TL;DR: Don’t worry about it. Just write.

For more: [https://www.ft.io/blog/good-website/](https://www.ft.io/blog/good-
website/)

