Building a personal website in 2021
I think the big number 1 that trumps all others when building a person website is: focus on writing content.<p>This is by far the hardest part. All the other stuff: it's just tangential. Wordpress, Blogger, Jekyll, Hugo, Medium, hand-written HTML files: IMHO it doesn't really matter <i>if</i> you don't have any content. Just use whatever is easiest to get started with and gets out of your way when writing. For me, personally, it would be writing Markdown in Vim and converting that. For other people, it's something else.<p>Later, when you actually have some content going you can start focusing on tooling, layout, and so forth. Converting things to another platform usually isn't too hard. But chances are, you will never actually get any content going. I've seen a lot of people create personal websites, write one or two things on it, and then basically don't do anything with it.<p>I've built some websites for various friends/non-profits over the years, and about 90% of the time they never actually wrote any content. These days I ask people to write content first, and then I'll build the website for them. Most of the time I never hear about it again. That's okay, it's really hard to write content and a lot of people (myself included, before I had more experience with this sort of thing) tend to be way too optimistic about it and underestimate just how hard this can be.<p>And people will read your website regardless if your content is good. Is Paul Graham's website the peak of web design? Not really. People still read it. Dan Luu's website? Pretty much the most basic HTML file you can get. Still widely read.<p>That being said, if your goal is also to <i>learn</i> more if you're young or inexperienced: then sure, muck around with these tools all you want. I learned a lot from building my personal website over the years in all sorts of tools (geocities, hand-written HTML, shell scripts, PHP, Python, PHP again but this time with MongoDB, back to shell script, and finally settled Jekyll) and for much of this time I didn't have a lot of content. That was okay, because I learned a lot from the process.