Dec 23, 2020

Get your own website for free

Today, I just pushed a whole bunch of design updates to this site! It is finally in a state where I’m comfortable sharing it publicly. This site is costing me no money to run and was fairly simple to set up. In this post, I’ll discuss some of the tools I’m using in case you’re interested in having a site like this for yourself. It does require a bit of coding knowledge so if you’re not a developer, you could hire someone to do it for you fairly quickly.

All of the code for this site is publicly available here and I forked it from this project. I’m using the Gatsby.js framework and Netlify for hosting. I’ve never used either before but there wasn’t too much of a learning curve to figure out how to work with them. If you’ve used React before then Gatsby will be very familiar since it is built on top of it. I also designed my own custom UI and my go-to tool for that is Figma.

The awesome thing I like about this setup is that the project comes complete with an admin dashboard that makes it easy for me to write and publish new blog posts. I couldn’t find any free blogging sites that were also well designed and gave me the flexibility to code up my own frontend. If someone knows of a blogging backend that does what Shopify does for e-commerce but for blogs then please let me know because that’s all I wanted and could not find a decent one.

I just wanted a personal site that I can use to showcase what I’m working on and keep a daily blog. I believe this setup will satisfy my needs for years to come so if you’re in the market for something similar, I highly recommend it!

- Brooklyn, NY