6 Reasons Why You Need a Personal Website

Creating a personal website has never been easier – you don’t need any web hosting or coding knowledge, all you need is a template that you can fill in with photos, links and text about yourself. In fact, even a ton of content on the subpages is unnecessary; all you really need is just one landing page, and your website is good to go!
The answer to the question of whether or not you should have a website: if you’re a media, digital, or creative professional – yes, absolutely! And here’s a list of reasons why.

Branding control

Unlike social media websites, most personal website services allow you to customize everything from background photos to fonts and colors. Therefore, having a social media page on LinkedIn Facebook, Twitter and even on Instagram is very useful, but in no way a replacement for a real website, because having your own website gives your personality and brand the opportunity to shine!
In other words, build your brand on your website and use social media for notifying your customers and other interested parties about your new website content.

Visual impact

No matter how interesting and informative your content is, people are visual beings and will always prefer being shown what to do and how to do it. For example, in your resume, you can say that you “successfully built a company blog that is currently being followed by 20,000 readers”, but with your personal site, you don’t have to tell them that – you can show them by taking them straight to the actual blog so they can see for themselves what’s so special about it. The website will connect you to the rest of the Internet, which opens up a world of possibilities – you can feature your work samples, sites you’ve worked on, articles you’ve written, anything you want!

You are on Google

Quite frankly, if you’re not on Google, you basically don’t exist and if you are, people will likely google you sooner or later. The name of the game here is owning your results! Let’s elaborate: most of the people using Google never make it past the first page of the results (admit it, you don’t either). The best way to move your personal website up the ranks is owning your FirstnameLastname.com domain – this will definitely secure you a spot at the top of the search results. Of course, there’s always a chance that the domain is taken, so don’t be afraid to get creative.

Cheap advertising

Although you can rest assured that you’re going to have to make some investments when it comes to coming up with ideas for your website and then building it, this is a small price to pay for all the benefits you’re going to get. For example, you can use a powerful, proven platform shared hosting as a starting point of building your website; this way, you basically get free marketing.
Additionally, a website is easily shareable, both on the Internet (social media pages, email) and in real life (business cards, billboards, etc). Essentially, having a website is the best complement you can find for any form of marketing.

Your central hub

Your website serves as a perfect starting point– you may be everywhere on the internet (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube, Instagram), but your website is your “master profile”!
The best part: it allows you the largest amount of control over its outlook.

Security

Did you know that a domain name actually costs less than a bottle of beer nowadays? In other words, buying your domain name now, even if you’re nowhere near building your website, is the smartest thing you could do; it serves as a precaution against somebody else taking your potential domain name (the worst part – who knows how they’d use it).