A Personal Website for a Writer: Basics and Key Points

Who among those who hold a pen does not want recognition? Or simply to share what they have written with people? Indeed, when you write “into the drawer,” you feel that your efforts are unnecessary: why write if no one will read it anyway? This phenomenon can be compared to love: there is no point in giving love and not being loved in return.

Therefore, it is not surprising that almost all beginning artists want to be published. However, when you learn about the prices at publishing houses, the rose-colored glasses instantly fall off and shatter. Yes, one hundred copies are good, but how much do they cost! It is fine if it is only two or three thousand, but what if it is seven or ten? And then you have to decide whether to sell these copies or simply give them away. A gift turns out to be quite unprofitable, and going around universities and organizing evenings in cafés can take years.

At one time, this situation became the reason why I became interested in creating a personal website. Now that it has been operating for several years, I can easily share the main points. Let us start with the creation itself. Yes, you can turn to specialized platforms (such as WordPress) and create pages using their builders. As design options, services offer hundreds of templates. But there are many more websites, so it is not surprising if you encounter one online that looks similar to yours. And it is unlikely that you will be able to add everything you want.

So, I decided to create the site on my own. To create pages, you need to learn the basic web programming languages, namely HTML and CSS. More precisely, not even the languages themselves, but the principles of how they work and a few tags. Sounds complicated? For me, a philologist without special knowledge, it took two weeks to figure it out, and another two days to write the pages. True, I came across a good online tutorial where everything was described simply and in detail.

Now I will talk about what makes a website better. Suppose that for one hundred copies of a small book you would have to pay two thousand hryvnias. You also have to pay for a website: every month for hosting (that is, space on a hard drive from a service provider that puts it on the internet) and for a domain (this is the website address). One thousand is enough for me to pay for a year. In a space of one gigabyte, you can place several thick books and hundreds of photographs. And poetry (prose, drama) on the site can be read both in Ukraine and in Canada, without going to a library or buying a book. Setting everything up on hosting is very simple: like on any similar site, everything there is designed for the client. Paying is also easy, even easier than paying utility bills online.

As you can see, everything is simple. If it is important for you to be read, a website is one of the best solutions. Yes, you will have to earn one thousand a year, but then you can share the link with anyone. If your body of work amounts to several thick volumes, they will easily fit on a gigabyte. In real life, you would have had to spend tens of thousands on them, and then travel around cities trying to sell them, while more and more people refuse to buy what they can do without. So the internet path, against this background, I think looks attractive.