Let’s suppose a friend without any coding experience wants to get started with a personal website.

What advice would you give and which service – or approach – would you recommend?

And yes, I’m asking for my #OwnYourWeb newsletter subscribers again. 😉 RT=🎉

@matthiasott

I would start by asking more about their goals, ambitions, and budget. There are a lot of no-code options, but most come with certain strengths and certain weaknesses. Some cost more than others.

I need to know more about their plans to offer specific recommendations.

@matthiasott get on a pubnix like sdf.org or a ~ https://tildeverse.org/ and start putting things in public_www/ personal site directory or whatever it's called. There's a plethora of tutorials and examples, with an arc towards creating original CGI.

Those inclined could #gopher instead or as well !

@matthiasott like lots of answers already, it depends. What does "get started with a personal website" mean, get started in learning how to build one, or get started on having one set up ASAP.

For the former I'd probably suggest they find a service where they can copy and paste code into a web interface like https://neocities.org, and then point them at https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/2022/responsive-web-design

Probably right now for the latter I'd suggest they look at https://carrd.co and build a landing page there.

@matthiasott Carrd.co for sure!

@matthiasott
Difficult to say with the objective just being "a personal website" and not knowing much about the friend.

I would first find out about goals and amount of time and money the friend is willing to invest. In German that would be »Ziele, Zeit und Zaster«.

This triangle determines the rest.

E.g. the combination of lots of money, little time and just static pages could result in Wix & Co.

And hey, it may not be hip, but you can build almost anything with - #WordPress

@matthiasott If they've never actually written HTML or CSS (or even JS, though that could come later), there's nothing wrong with just writing some static files on your computer and serving it up in your browser and being amazed.

Even playing with something like the Stylus extension in Firefox for instant CSS changes and getting familiar with devtools, all from the comfort of your computer before even putting anything out there.

@matthiasott Depends on their needs. For blogging (and in English), maybe micro.blog or write.as. Alternatively, if they like the challenge and just want something simple, learning HTML and CSS is a great way to do it. But it’s not for everyone.

@matthiasott If they want something unique & interactive (rather than bloggy), I'd suggest having a play with https://hatch.one
(disclosure: I've done stuff for them as a freelancer)

@matthiasott Lots of great advice here, so I'll just give another thumbs up to https://neocities.org.

https://glitch.com is also great, and lets you do more advanced things. But another great thing about it is, as someone mentioned Carrd, Glitch has a bunch of easy to use templates, including https://glitch.com/glitch-in-bio.

@matthiasott @RyunoKi Use a static code generator. Might have a bigger learning curve at first, bit is 100% maintenance free after being deployed. Anything else will require frequent and ongoing maintenance.

@matthiasott If they want to stick with no-code, Webflow and Wordpress are good options. Wordpress especially is a nice stepping-stone because if and when someone decides to do more themselves, they can move from .com to .org or self-hosting.

@matthiasott I'd start with looking for a solution that offers themes and plugins.

Hugo (because Go binaries are easy to get running), Jekyll (integrated with GitHub - although personally I would like to see a trend away from Microsoft) or Grav (PHP can be run pretty much anywhere) come to my mind.

Perhaps help setting them up.

Themes can then be used as learning material to make the result one's own.

Plugins to extend capabilities.

@matthiasott I would have them start with Carrd. If they found that they couldn’t do what they wanted with that, I’d recommend Squarespace or (less so) Wix.

If they wanted the free route and aren’t afraid of learning some code, Jekyll through GitHub Pages (which is what I use).

The thing is, I bet a huge number of folks would be able to do everything they need (not everything they dream/imagine when looking at a Squarespace promo) with Carrd alone.

@sarajw @matthiasott Seconding carrd.co, it stood out to me when I was looking for a COST FREE way to let Fine Arts (no web experience) students create their own portfolio websites.

@matthiasott MDN can get verbose and overwhelming for beginners but there are other hand-holding guides out there, and then you probably end up on MDN eventually. Freecodecamp.org but also the dev.to guides for HTML/CSS.

If that's not their goal and they first-and-foremost want something for the world to see, they don't care about learning the why/how, omg.lol is not a bad start, or micro.blog, or both! Lots of other excellent suggestions here.

@matthiasott is it actually necessary for said friend to touch the code? Why not just set up a wordpress site? It's what I would suggest to my non-coding family for example (otherwise I'd be spending the next 3 months sorting out code issues...)

@matthiasott With decades of coding experience I don't have the skills to implement web sites from scratch :-) It requires a whole set of skills of which coding experience might not be even the most important one.