Back in 2005 I bought my domain name and got a website.
A kind friend of a friend hosted my site and built it for me. It was basically one page with about 10 pictures in my portfolio.
It may have been a pretty basic site (which I couldn't update myself) but it felt exciting to have my own little corner in cyberspace.
I was studying photography at the time and soon would use the site to help me get a job and build my career.
12 years later and building and maintaining your own website has never been easier.
For the past few years I've used the US company Squarespace.
I'm in no way techie and have no idea how to code, but Squarespace allows you to choose a template and with tips and tutorials it helps you build and customise your website.
Here are some of the other reasons I chose to build through Squarespace:
1. Free trial - you can sign up and be roadtesting one of the Squarespace templates within minutes. You can play around with text and add pictures to your dummy website to see if it works for you. At the end of the trial you either walk away without a site and without spending any money, or you sign up and have your own website. It's really easy.
2. Choice of templates - I have played around loads with the various Squarespace templates. There are some that work best for online retail businesses, photographers, designers, or bloggers. I find you pick up the design basics pretty quickly when creating your site. It's always nice to freshen up your website with a new template once in a while.
3. Online support - the Squarespace team are normally quick to reply to questions. I tend to message them through Twitter to ask any site-related queries. There are also tutorial videos galore and plenty of guides online.
4. Mobile apps - Squarespace have two great apps I regularly use on my phone. The first is a blog app - it allows you to write and post blogs on the move. It's neat and easy to use. The second is an analytics app. You can see your website figures instantly and also view where your website traffic is coming from.
5. Blogging - many bloggers use Wordpress or Blogger. I write my blog through my Squarespace site. I really like the blog layout options.
Are there negatives? Of course. I get frustrated sometimes that I can't have a particular feature within my website. This is usually a restriction with the template I am using. But I feel things are improving all the time and new templates and options crop up every now and then.
For £85 a year, I'm really happy with Squarespace. It's teaching me a thing or two about building and maintaining a website and I'm really happy to have created a site I like to share my work.
