Ask HN: Is it essential to have personal websites? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is it essential to have personal websites?

11 pointsSingAlong5 comments

I work on freelance projects (thru referrals) for around 3 months in a year and during the rest of the year I spend the money I made on some personal projects (and attend college). This is what I've been doing for the past 3 years.

I have a blog on Tumblr, which I use to take notes and to share stuff incase someone else is going to find that thru search engines, coz I sometimes come across really different problems (happened just twice though) during to my random working pattern. I work on random stuff, so I just post the solutions them on my blog hoping that someone else would find that useful. And sometimes have thought about getting a domain name for my personal website with a profile and recent work etc. When I sit to design some mocks for the site, I begin to wonder if I really need one.

View on HN

Yes, utterly and absolutely.

If you're a designer: personal websites are a sandbox where you can experiment with new designs, see what works for what kind of content or app, try out latest trends (if you're like that) or buck them with your own style.

There's a book on the subject by Joe Shepter called Personal Web Sites: Top Designers Push the Boundaries with Experimental Design and Graphics.

Amazon link: http://tinyurl.com/cfqz67

If you're a coder: your site can give you a place to tinker with building basic projects like a blogging engine, picture portfolio, a useful app or etc. And if you blog out your process and share what you've learned, you can slowly build relationships with others and some googlejuice for your efforts.

These are all things you need to try on your personal corner of the internet that you can call home and that has your stamp on it - being able to customize a theme on someone else's site isn't enough.

It's useful to have one, because prospective clients will go to your domain to see what your work looks like. If you have a domain but no web site you get questions. If you have a portfolio, then it is not really a requirement, but it does add to the image of professionalism. If I were you I would go for simple but elegant with links to your blog and sites that you have done.

I left out portfolios in my meta-answer below, it feels like the first thing designers concentrate on and typically procrastinate on forever because they build it up in their heads to something that needs to be perfect before it can be unveiled. I know because I've done this and so has every designer I've ever talked to.

Having said that, yeah, having a folio up is definitely worthwhile. I went freelance in Nov and have been booked solid with work every day since just because of the case study area of my site I put up during the summer:

http://alabut.com/work.html

Essential? No. You get a web site to fulfill a need. If you have no need for a personal site, you don't need one and shouldn't have to get it.

That said: I use my personal site to organize the work I've done, and that's something that no other web site does well, so for me (and very possibly for you, if you do lots of work), the organization makes it worth it.

I would suggest that. I was applying for a job at my college doing programming work for a website and database. One of the questions was whether or not I had a personal website, which I didn't. I did not end up with that job.

A website will make you more professional. Let's say I come across your blog. If I read more than a few entries, it would probably be that I was interested in your writing. Since your writing sounds technical, your blog might make me interested in having you work for me (assuming that I was in a position where I was managing people). Well, if your blog was on a website, I would be able to find out a lot more about you. And things like a resume and a project portfolio might convince me that I wanted to contact you.

So basically my point is that a website related to your work and career will help you market yourself and build relationships with other people. Not everyone will be looking for programmers, but it at least gets your name out to more people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com