Own Your Web

Hi All! 🤗 For the summer holidays, my family and I went to France. On our way to the Atlantic Ocean, we shortly stopped in Chartres, a lovely town southwest of Paris, which is famous for its monumental and impressively beautiful cathedral. On the way back, we visited Paris and climbed up the stairs (well done, kids!) of one of the world’s most...

Hi All! 🤗 Let’s talk about the first thing many of your visitors will see and thus one of the most important places on any personal website: the home page. “The home” is where you leave a first impression and where people decide whether the website they are looking at – and the services you might be offering – are worth their time. But it is...

Hi All! 🤗 Imagine, just for a second, a future in which we all have our own websites and that those sites are at the center of everything we do and create online. Wouldn’t it be amazing to be able to collect reactions from other personal websites or large platforms when we publish something on our own sites? And wouldn’t it be exciting if we...

Hi All! 🤗 There are many pages you can add to your personal site that people can visit if they want to learn more about you. A “contact” page or an “about” page are two classics that you’ll find on many sites out there. But what if someone doesn’t want to read your bio, your scope of activities, or a list of your accolades? What if that person...

Hi All! 🤗 It is one of the most common reasons why we abandon our personal sites and blogs: at some point, we stop publishing. But why? Weren’t we so enthusiastic when we started (or restarted) our sites? Didn’t we tell ourselves that this time, we would really post more regularly? And didn’t it also work well for a few posts? But then, everyday...

Hi All! 🤗 Imagine you post and make new friends on an online network for more than a decade – and suddenly, your account gets suspended for no apparent reason. And there is nothing you can do about it. Or imagine the online community you were an active part of for years just closes down and all user data gets deleted after a few months. And...

Hi All! 🤗 Every day, we browse the Web and scroll our timelines. And every day, we find even more interesting websites, blog posts, articles, videos, podcasts, and other insights and ideas that we want to document, preserve, and share. The most obvious way to save something of interest still is to create a good old bookmark. And there are many...

Hi All! 🤗 In the last issue, we looked at blogrolls as one way to improve the visibility and discoverability of our sites. Whether or not you want to add a blogroll to your site is a matter of personal preference. But there is something else which probably everyone with a personal website should do: adding an RSS feed. What’s RSS? RSS, which...

Hi All! 🤗 “Where have all the websites gone?” “Websites, as we know them, are dead.” “Blogging is dead.” I don’t know about you, but whenever I hear or read statements like that in controversial headlines or viral posts, I can’t help but think: “No! All of that is still here – you’re just not really looking for it!” Sure, the web has changed and...

Hi All! 🤗 One question I’ve heard repeatedly from people getting started with their personal website is “what pages and sections – like blog, photos, about me – does my site need to have?” I asked myself the exact same question when I first started with my site. I looked at other people’s websites and eagerly listened to folks arguing that a...

Hi All! 🤗 At the beginning of this year, I wrote in a blog post which I titled The Year of the Personal Website: In the search for a permanent home on the web, more and more people are now rediscovering the personal website as a place to share and document their thoughts and publish their work. I’ve written at length before about why this is...

Hi All! 🤗 In the previous issues, we looked at how you can choose a domain name, how a personal website can change your life, and what people are using to build their sites. But Matthias, I hear you say, that all sounds a lot like something that requires a lot of technical knowledge! What about all your readers who are not nerds? All those folks...

Hi All! 🤗 In the previous issues, we looked at how having a personal website can change your life and what’s in a domain name. Once you’re fired up and registered your domain though, your next decision is probably the one which will have the biggest overall impact and also something that a lot of people asked me about via email: what tech stack,...

Hi All! 🤗 So, you registered a domain. And you started working on your personal site. Maybe you already got a first version of your site online. Perhaps you even published a few posts. But suddenly, there’s this question in your head: “But – is it worth it?” Almost everyone who starts building a personal website sooner or later asks themselves...

Hi All! 🤗 Let’s talk about one of the first things to consider when setting up your personal website: the name, or to be more specific, the domain name. Picking a domain name is something people often struggle with, because it comes with a few questions: What is a “good” domain name for your site? Should you use your real name or a nickname or...

Hi All! Welcome to Own Your Web! 🎉 First of all, I’d like to thank you again for signing up! 🤗 When I shared the link to the newsletter last weekend, I did not expect that so many people would subscribe so quickly. I’m overwhelmed by the response and I see it as a sign that the topic of the newsletter hits a nerve. It looks like I’m not the...