I think that if you make a survey following the right statistical methods asking experienced web designers which was the first project they developed, ninety percent of them would answer “my own personal site”. A t least I did. It is definitely a good place to start. You do not have to get info from anyone, you are not responsible for satisfying anyone's needs, requirements and expectations - just yourself.

It is a very good project to start with web development projects in order to tests your skills, acquire experience with all the related things to build a website, and it will build your own self-confidence.

Of course, that is not the only reason why you might want to create your personal website. You can definitely have something to say, and want your thoughts and beliefs to be publicised, or just want to have fun chatting with your friends or people around the world.

Of course, that is not the only reason why you might want to designing a personal website. You can definitely have something to say, and want your thoughts and beliefs to be publicised, or just want to have fun chatting with your friends or people around the world.

No matter what your objectives and purposes are, building a personal website is a great experience. First we will try to focus on what we mean when we say “personal website”. We are not talking about a website that talks about a person, but a website that is intended for personal objectives.

For example, if you are a photographer and want to expose and sell your photos, that won’t be covered here. That is a business site.

If you are Tarot reader and offer your reading services through the web, that is also not covered here. Here we will talk about sites that are intended to be for personal objectives, to show your personal information and profile, to interact with other people, but not for any business purpose where a completely different set of rules applies.

That said, it is kind of logical to think that in any personal web development project the budget will be low, so we will have to focus on that aspect when going trough the list of things you should take care of when building your site.

A good place to start is web hosting review. In most cases, for your personal website, you won’t need a specific domain name for your site, something like www.myname.com. If that’s the case, you might take advantage of a great variety of free hosting sites, and even a subset of them that are specialized in personal websites like myspace.com. So, for the time being we are investing $0 on this and we  have the hosting solved.

Now we have to Create the Site

Usually, those kind of hosting services provide a set of free tools in order to create your personal website. That would help a lot, but if you want to spice them up a little you can consider other free options, like getting personal website templates,  which are really stunning and easy to use, and personal websites that do not have great variations in content and layout. They are really a good solution.

As in every website, in a personal website content is the core. Unless you are a graphic designer, or your hobby is graphic design, you won ’t have visitors in your site expecting to see great design, nice color combination, and top of the top layouts and animations. They expect to know you, talk to you and the community, so personal websites are therefore not graphic design intensive.

Now let’s focus on the content for a personal website and information a personal website should have in order to be attractive to users.

Like any other website, an image says more than one thousand words, so you should definitely have images of yourself, your hobbies, or the related topics that are expressed in your website. Iit’s not a good idea to have a huge image gallery, but yes, to have one image that is frequently updated.

Also, you can spice up the site with other kinds of media, videos of your own, of your friends, and even you can research about adding an online web cam that allows visitors to watch you online with your permission. Internet experts say that one of the most amazing things the internet future has  is community building. Tthat means joining a set of people with common interests in order to build a community around that topic. A website is a good place to do that.

The reason is that, for example, if you have a particular interest in sea turtles, maybe your circle of friends, your family and even at school you cannot find anyone with the same interest. But guess what happens if you create a good site about yourself with your principal interest set to sea turtles?

If you do it right, position it correctly in search engines, and provide interesting content, in a few months you will have built a worldwide sea turtle community. You will be able to talk about sea turtle food, how they swim, where they go, how they reproduce and a huge list of topics that you never imagined there would be other persons interested in. It is very common for every person to have one or two main areas of interests, so personal websites often end in that specific topic for a website.

The first rule you have to follow in order to keep your site interesting is, UPDATE it. A website needs A LOT of maintenance The more often you update it, the more often you must add new content to it, the more interesting it will be. Imagine visiting the site of a person one day, but you check the next day and seethe same content, and the same the next day; the most likely thing to happen will be that you won’t visit it anymore. Keep this in mind: UPDATE is basic for a personal website. There are also sets of features that will help your personal website be interesting. You should provide some kind of interaction not only between visitors and you, but between the visitors themselves, too. A good place to start is a visitors' book, where they post their comments. You can select either those comments that are to be viewed just by you, or those that are to be posted in your site. That provides a good interaction between all the persons who visit and use your site.

You should make your best efforts to build your community. You have to add links to your community members to make the community stronger. Be sure your community members adds links to your site and provide a “recommendation of this site to a friend”.

As with every good thing, there are certain things you should be aware of. A personal website is very personal, and it will talk about you. You will be providing information, expressing feelings and thoughts to the whole world.

Be sure all the info you provide won’t hurt or bother anyone, and most importantly, that it won’t cause you problems. It’s not a good idea to publish your address or phone number. You should send that info to the specific person you want to have that info, but never make iit accessible to everyone.

In conclusion, going through  a personal website development project is a step everybody who is interested in the internet should take. It will be very big fun and an interesting process.

In conclusion, going through a personal website development project is a step everybody who is interested in the internet should take. It will be very big fun and an interesting process.

Personal Homepage Design

A personal homepage is a website belonging to one person. It can be related to that person or family. A personal homepage may designed as a single page design or a database driven website, with forms, guestbook, flash animations and so on.

The content of personal homepages is slightly different and can, depending on the hosting server, contain anything that other websites do. However, typical personal homepages contain images, some personal information, information about the owner’s family or friends, gilfriends, or hobbies. Many also contain short biographies, résumés, and blogs.

Why do we design personal homepages?

Many people build and mentain personal homepages because they are the most effective way to express their opinions or feelings, or simply in order to have an outlet. Some web designers view the concept of a personal homepage more metaphysically, valuing the concept of owning and "residing" in a "home" in cyberspace and on the World Wide Web.

This can also extend to the ownership of personal domain names and the associated personal homepages and e-mail addresses connected to those domains, although with the advent of affordable web hosting only a few people own and maintain their own personal servers. The vast majority of casual Internet users tend to utilize personal homepages included in the free services provided by social networks such as MySpace and Blogspot