How to Build a Personal Website From Scratch

1. Reclaiming Personal Digital Sovereignty

For the past decade, internet users have outsourced their personal expression to centralized social media feeds. In those walled gardens, you do not own your domain, you do not control the presentation of your writing, and your essays compete against algorithmic rage-bait for fleeting seconds of user attention.

A personal website is an enduring digital estate. When you own a domain name and publish static web files, your writing remains accessible 15 years from now, resilient against platform bankruptcies, algorithm shifts, and corporate acquisitions.

2. Purpose & Information Hierarchy

Before opening a text editor, clarify the purpose of your website:

• Is it an engineering portfolio showcasing open-source projects?
• A long-form technical journal documenting systems research?
• A simple digital business card with your public PGP key and contact information?

Resist the temptation to install a 500MB JavaScript framework, dozens of npm packages, and a complex build pipeline for a site that only needs to display text and images.

3. Choosing a Domain Name & Independent DNS

Choose a personal domain that you intend to keep for decades. A simple firstname.dev, lastname.org, or evocative technical name works best.

Keep your domain registrar (e.g. Porkbun, Namecheap, Cloudflare Registrar) completely separate from your web hosting provider. This ensures that if you ever decide to switch hosting servers, your domain registration remains safely in your hands.

4. Semantic HTML5 Foundations

Semantic HTML communicates meaning to browsers, search engines, and assistive screen readers:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
  <meta charset="UTF-8">
  <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
  <title>Julian Vance • Systems Engineer</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css">
</head>
<body>
  <header>...</header>
  <main>
    <article>
      <h1>Building Resilient Distributed Systems</h1>
      <p>Prose goes here...</p>
    </article>
  </main>
  <footer>...</footer>
</body>
</html>

5. Modern CSS: Custom Properties and CSS Grid

You do not need Tailwind or Bootstrap to build clean, responsive designs. Modern CSS natively provides:

• CSS Custom Properties (Variables): Centralize color palettes and spacing tokens.
• CSS Grid: Clean two-dimensional page layouts without messy float hacks or nested wrappers.
• Flexbox: Perfect one-dimensional alignment for navigation bars and metadata rows.
• Max Reading Width: Keeping prose width constrained to 65ch to 70ch ensures comfortable line lengths for human reading.

6. Purposeful Vanilla JavaScript

Add JavaScript only when it provides genuine functional value: a mobile menu toggle, a reading progress indicator on long essays, or a live search filter. A personal site should remain 100% readable and functional even if a visitor browses with JavaScript disabled!

7. Accessibility & Technical SEO Essentials

• Ensure high contrast between text and background (WCAG AA ratio ≥ 4.5:1).
• Include meaningful alt text on all images.
• Provide visible focus outlines (:focus-visible) for keyboard navigation.
• Add Open Graph meta tags (og:title, og:description, og:image) so your articles look polished when shared.

8. Deployment via Git & Automated HTTPS

Modern static hosting platforms make deploying a personal website free, secure, and instantaneous:

# Commit your files and push to remote:
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "Launch personal website v1.0"
$ git push origin main

Platforms like GitHub Pages, Cloudflare Pages, or Netlify automatically detect your commit, pull the repository, provision free automated Let's Encrypt TLS certificates, and distribute your static HTML across global Anycast edge nodes in seconds.

9. The 10-Step Launch Checklist

1. Verify document has a single <h1> and semantic landmarks.
2. Confirm all image tags contain explicit width, height, and descriptive alt text.
3. Test responsive layout on mobile, tablet, and desktop viewports.
4. Validate external links and internal navigation routes.
5. Ensure SSL/TLS HTTPS is enforced with automatic HTTP redirection.
6. Generate an XML Sitemap and valid robots.txt.
7. Test keyboard accessibility (Tab, Enter, Escape).
8. Verify dynamic copyright year updates in the footer.
9. Create comprehensive Privacy Policy and Disclaimer pages.
10. Measure Core Web Vitals to guarantee 95+ performance scores.

10. Frequently Asked Questions