Are you considering creating a website? Before you dive in, take a step back and explore alternatives. Maybe running a social media account, large group chat or Discord server might be a better fit for your goals. But if you’re still convinced that a website is the way to go, here are some things to consider:
Audience: Who are you trying to reach? Can they access the internet or websites? Are they more familiar with social media, group chats, or community notice boards?
Message: What are you communicating? Can it be achieved best in text, image, or video? Do you need to consider other mediums of communication?
Outcomes: After seeing your posts, what do you hope people will do? Do you want them to contact you? Share with friends? What are the outcomes you seek?
You are in control of your data. Y’know sometimes when you go to view a post on pintreset or instagram, it asks you to log in to see the content? Why should people who want to contact you be forced to sign the terms of service for a platform they might not even want to use?
When you post on social media, that content is ‘pushed’ to everyone who is following you. Which might not be what you want. It forces you to maintain a specific style of content which is ‘engaging’ or is highly targeted to your audience. Content which deviates from specific expectations can result in annoying your followers. There is much less pressure when pubishing to your own website – allowing you to make content which can be discovered by people searching for the topics you discuss (or searching for you).
You can post more than videos, pictures and text. This means you can embed games, polls, forms, entire spreadsheets, share files, interactive graphs, databases and more. Granted, this may take a little bit more technical know-how, but it can all be learnt, or shared by those willing.
You can shape it to suit your needs. For example this website is largely a blog and information about/from me because I want it to be a space people can find me through, as well as a space where I can share the interesting work of my friends. You might be more interested in storing and sharing knowledge you might find youself developing a knowledge garden (similar to a personal wikipedia). Check out reasons this might be a good idea.
Custom domain name. This can be useful for a professional polish to put on business cards etc, and can be supprisingly cheap. I use namecheap.com. This allows me to have emails associated with my domain, such as java@javagrant.com.
A custom domain means regular expense. Maybe only $15/year, but it’s still something to remember to pay
More accounts with more services. I’m not a fan of having more points of failure–and if you don’t get value out of having a website (reminder: you might not have a good sense of the vaue it provides you without analytics) then it is just another thing to remember a password for.
It’s complicated. This is a half point, because it is initially a lot more complicated than creating a social media account, but after setup may only be a little more complicated than social media to maintain.