Everyone’s on social media these days. Fewer people are building a personal website.
So that’s exactly why I’m doing it.
What’s the story behind my personal website?
I’ve been wanting to share my writing on a personal website for a long time. Since about last October, after the first launch of PARAZETTEL, I started to build on Obsidian Publish and although I really enjoyed the experience with this service, I knew that in the end, I wanted a completely customisable website for my work.
Much inspiration in my creator journey came from the likes of Tim Ferriss, Mark Manson, James Clear, Shane Parrish at Farnam Street and more. They all had WordPress websites for blog posts, articles, newsletters, podcasts and other things, and I wanted the same for my library of work that I was growing through posting on Medium and my newsletter.
At the start of 2024, I scheduled the project of ‘building a more durable setup for Fundamentalised’ for February. But the time rolled around and I sold out by moving all my newsletter issues to Substack and calling it a day.
But I wasn’t happy with this, constantly procrastinated by looking at Framer and Webflow templates and considering taking the jump to make things work with a personal website on these platforms.
I’d played around with WordPress in the past, but only ever using free templates and resources, and worrying very little about hosting and setting a site up for real.
But again, after trying to build on Framer and giving up due to more granularity than I needed in a site, I started to look for premium WordPress templates most similar to the style of site I wanted to build.
Much of this was during a coach journey back to where I live in Sheffield from spending time with my family in Bristol over Easter. It was then that I landed on a WordPress template that I quite liked. One that looked a lot like the website that I wanted to build.
But I still didn’t make the leap. I wasn’t certain that this was what I wanted to do. But within the next week I’d had enough. The thought of finally building the website that I’d wanted for months was overwhelming. And I had some income on the side from PARAZETTEL and my other business endeavours, so I took the chance.
I purchased a year of WordPress hosting on Hostinger and one year of updates for the theme I’m using and got to work. Only a couple of weeks later, the site looks like what you see today.
But why go to all the effort to do this?
I think the first reason is because it felt right. I’d had the idea of building a website in my head for a long time now, and it had got to the point where I couldn’t do any other business work because the thought of building the site was overwhelming any other ideas and thoughts in my head.
I couldn’t sit and think about content strategy without being sure of where I was going to post everything, and in my experience when your mind is ruminating on an idea so much then it’s important to bring it to life so that you can get on with making progress in other areas.
So I went for it. And now I can get back to creating new stuff at the same time as migrating everything to the website, which is going to take a little bit longer. Indeed, I was going to hire a VA to do the job for me, but I think that I can do it myself if I take things slowly and just do a piece every once in a while.
There are a few other reasons that building a website seemed like a good idea to me…
I’d be wrong not to mention the business side of owning my content and my audience too. I can write whatever I want on this site and display it however I want. I own the traffic and audience that comes here and although in the long run, I’ll be sacrificing Medium partner program earnings, I hope to be able to partner with companies and creators whose products and content I use, consume and admire. It’s all in the interest of giving better value to the readers and the creators who want to partner with me.
I’ll run sponsorships and promotions, but I promise you’ll never see those tacky Google Ads on my website. I care about the value provided to the reader more than I do profit. And I believe that this website is the best way to maximise both of these things.
Also, I think it would make me stand out. Everyone and their best mate has a Linktree with a Twitter, a Substack and a Notion product on it nowadays. Fewer have their own corner of the internet where they can share their work in the way they want to.
This site’s an asset too. When people want to know more about me I can direct them to the site. It looks great on my CV, where people might just glance over the growth of social media accounts. There’s something very professional and noticeable about having your own website.
Surely nobody’s building a personal blog site for a reason though?
Yeah, you’re right, I’ve also heard it’s hard to break into the field these days – large companies have massive budgets for SEO, making them much more likely to appear in search engines than your little site.
And I completely understand the possibility that this site might not work. I might never get the traffic off the ground. I might never be able to monetise and bring in deals and sponsors like I originally thought I would. But I’m not too worried about this happening.
I’m not worried for the same reason I’m not worried about being drowned out on social media accounts either. And that reason is that nobody can replicate what I’m doing. I’m writing about personal experiences, about my own perspective on the world. And nobody else in the world can write about that.
The people who go to Tim Ferriss’s personal website are there because they like Tim. I know he has huge amounts of traffic and probably ranks quite well on search engines himself, but this isn’t the main reason that Tim gets so much traffic. People are on tim.blog because they like how Tim writes. They like his character, the topics and the personal insights he shares. And nobody can replicate Tim’s life and write about it in the same way that he can.
And I plan on relying on the same commitment from my readers, although for now on a smaller scale than Tim. I hope that I can provide insights related to my experience that can’t be found on the big corporation websites that write generic content. I love it when people leave comments on my work, saying how I’ve resonated with them. It’s one of the most meaningful outcomes that results from all the writing I do.
I hope this article has cleared some things up for you. I’m not going to stop posting on social media for now, especially the short-form platforms, but just know that I’m going to be pouring a lot more effort into my own domain on the internet, which is the website fundamentalised.com. I hope that you stay around for the ride. Thanks for reading!