Why most web developers should avoid personal websites
Websites are a permanent investment
What Should A Web Developer Portfolio Look Like?
If one is to market oneself as a web developer, it may seem essential to have a personal website. After all, isn’t that what you are supposed to be good at, making websites?
There is a glaring problem with this mentality, and that is the skills and processes involved to build websites are very different from what is involved in owning one.
The issue I have with personal websites, is that they tend to quickly fall out of date, both in terms of content, style, and best practices. Unless a website is being updated regularly, you are better off creating a document like a resume, brochure, whitepaper etc.
Perhaps the easiest form of a website to maintain and create, the blog, is also the least impressive as a demonstration of skills. So if you are web developer, or trying to become a web developer, your time may be better spent developing the type of websites you want to create, and not a personal website. If anything, web developers should appreciate the difficulty and complexity of well done web development.
The second reason why web developers may not want a personal website, is because web development involves a lot of niche specializations. If you try to make a full website to demonstrate your skills, the thing that will be immediately obvious is where your skills are limited. A portfolio should highlight your best, not your worst.
It is okay to specialize, important even, so web developers should not be suprised if they are not able to build an impressive looking website by themselves. If anything, websites built by specialized webdevelopers tend to be more more clean and functional, but impressive, than graphics people and designers.
Web Developers Should Avoid Ready Made Solutions
Given the nature of software, that it is easy to copy and paste and then modify, ie “fork” a project, one might be tempted to use a “ready made” solution for creating a website. There are lot of services like wix or squarespace where you can run and host a website using prebuilt templates. Or maybe you can find some open source static html templates that you can modify yourself?
The issue with ready made solutions, is again, they fall quickly out of date, and are difficult to make custom specific modifications. Additionally, they don’t really demonstrate or develop the kind of skills you want to have as a web developer, which is a bottom up understanding of how the web works. It can be very difficult to adapt a ready made solution to fit your specific needs, and so the website may not be as impressive as you would like.
What I recommend Instead of Personal Websites
If you can get experience working on or maintaing a real website, that is almost always preferrable. However, this may not reflect the direction you want to take your skills.
A better alternative to building a website is typesetting documents. Unlike a website which is served dynamically to web browser, and rendered fresh each time, a document is “rendered” one time, into a standardized deterministic format, like a pdf file or an image file.
Typically tools like latex are used to typeset documents, but you can do essentially the same process in html and css. If you really want live examples of your web development skills, there are online javascript/html/css editors where you can showcase specific up to date experiments.
Websites are difficult, complex, and expensive. If you wanted to get a job as a car mechanic, you would not be expected to build a car from scratch. The same thing applies to websites. The wright brothers were not airline mechanics, but bicycle mechanics. Spend your time where it will have the most impact. Avoid a personal website.