Let’s Build a Website
In 2024, I’m going to rebuild my personal website, DeborahCarver.com, for an hour each week, until it’s done. I’ll be livestreaming my process and progress on YouTube, Twitch, and LinkedIn weekly on Wednesdays at 6:30 Eastern. If you want to build along with me and you’re working on a budget, I encourage you to subscribe, tune in, and take notes.
If it’s been a while since you’ve updated your personal site or if you’ve never had a personal website, I encourage you to build along with me.
Beginning January 5, I’ll be activating this Substack. Here, I’ll be emailing each video episode, summary, and transcript on Fridays so you can access each episode on-demand, play it at 1.5 speed, or pause at the parts that help you the most.
Is revamping your digital presence your New Year’s resolution? Subscribe before January 10 to receive 25% off and build along with me this year.
This project has several aims:
Demystify the website development process for everyone who didn’t spend their teenage years learning to code.
Explore the new crop of website production tech, as we move from clunky WYSIWYG editors to sleeker low-code and no-code website builders.
Lay the foundations for better online experiences as mass social media platforms lose their appeal.
Make the experience of building online a practice rather than a chore.
If you’ve built a website before, you know that the process won’t always be fun, per se, but if you work alongside me, you’ll have a web presence where you can promote yourself, publish your own work, host your c.v., create a portfolio, or whatever else you want to do.
The open web is a canvas. Let’s fill it with great websites.
This project is presented by The Content Technologist, a resource for content professionals working in the age of algorithms.
Why build a website?
More than social platforms, the open web still holds a fair amount of promise and opportunity for independent publishers and individuals to own, promote, and monetize their work. I say this as a professional content strategist with a 20-year career: the open web is more or less the same as it was when I first started building websites in the late 1990s, whereas social networks and other platforms have shifted radically.
But many, many people still enjoy using and building websites.
I fully believe anyone can build a website. But learning to navigate software, understanding the technical side, customizing templates, and setting the whole thing up is tedious and time-consuming.
The process of planning and building a website is very different than creating and printing a physical publication. It requires a different approach to thinking about content. If you’re building something that lasts, it’s not a short process.
It’s also worth it. At the end of this program, you’ll understand much more about digital publishing and have an appreciation for the web development process. You may even be inspired to move beyond a personal website and create your own publication.
How long does it take?
I fully expect this project to take a year of weekly building. I’m not going to build in between episodes, so we’ll make the progress that we make each week. The goal is to have a functioning personal website by the end of 2024.
What will the process be?
For my consultancy, I have created a process for website redesigns that we will follow in this program. It’s a process designed to help businesses create better websites that serve specific goals, but it can easily be adapted for personal projects. The process roughly looks like this:
Strategy - Defining your goals, developing wireframes and sitemaps, and making a plan
Administration - Creating requirements and choosing software
Production - Actually creating and placing the content
Distribution - Optimizing your website to be findable and discoverable
Style - Customizing your templates and developing your brand
Measurement - Ensuring you can track your progress so your website is an effective promoter for your business
I’ve also made a list of specific tasks that I will follow while building the website, so I don’t stray too far off course. We’ll take a look at those during the program.
What kind of website are you building?
I’m rebuilding DeborahCarver.com, a personal website meant to house my biography, writing, speaker information, and personal projects.
Many other types of websites — ecommerce, newsletter, blog, forum, etc. — are out there, but we’re going to start with a personal site. It can certainly be expanded into another type of website! But for the moment, we’re going to keep it to a more minimalist personal platform.
Think of it as the minimum viable product approach to a personal online brand.
About your host
My name is Deborah Carver, and I run a consultancy and newsletter called The Content Technologist. I have been building websites since 1997, before I could drive.
But I am not a developer. I much prefer writing words over code. Nevertheless, I firmly believe that one of the best things writers can do to boost their careers is learn how to navigate web software.
In my consultancy, I help businesses redesign, measure, and manage websites with large collections of content. I also manage my business’s website and archive, which is run as a publication and is not meant to be synonymous with my name.
But although I create the strategy on behalf of clients, I develop the builds myself — which means I am extemely rusty, and my coding skills are rather out of date.
And as of right now, my personal website — DeborahCarver.com — is embarrassingly out of commission.
Instead of working alone and cursing my way through it, leaving dissatisfied with the results, I’m bringing you along with me. Let’s recharge our digital presence in 2024.
Shouldn’t building a website be totally free?
The weekly livestreams are available for free, if you wish to tune in at 6:30 Eastern on YouTube, Twitch, or LinkedIn. This Substack offers an additional set of tools for support if you’d like to also redo your website along with me.
In demystifying the process of building the web, I want to emphasize: building online takes time, patience, skill, and a small investment. It’s not a “free” endeavor to build online. Websites take time and money to maintain for both individuals and businesses.
Once the $15/month guided Substack course is over and your website is built, you can transition your monthly budget into hosting and other managed services. You can certainly learn to build for free, self-install your own software, etc., but developing a website is a complex process, and the open source route takes far more time. If you’d rather not get cross-eyed from the complexity, I recommend setting aside between $25 and $50 a month for hosting and learning (including this course).
Fostering paid subscribers will allow me, your host, to invest in new features. I’d like to offer commenting, feature some guests, and help you along with your sites as you build.
Think of it as the Stolen Sharpie Revolution of websites. True, it’s not as inexpensive as copying a bunch of zines at Kinko’s, but I’m creating this project in the same spirit of self-publishing: charging just enough to support the effort I’m putting into creating the newsletter while remaining low-priced enough to be accessible to a broad audience.
If you follow along, by the end of 2024, you’ll have a working website under your own domain name where you’ll be able to send clients, readers, collaborators, etc., and it’ll save you time and money in the long run.
