Last week, I wanted to make a new website for my ghostwriting business, but I wasn’t thrilled with any of the options. While we love Ghost.org for newsletters and membership sites — that’s what we use for Remote Queer — it’s not a great fit if you just need a simple site to host your portfolio. Most of the existing Ghost themes focus on blog posts, and you have to do a lot of work to customize your site’s page types and layouts.
Another option is to use a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) website builder like Webflow or Squarespace. These are great for non-coders, because they allow you to drag-and-drop components around the page without writing any code yourself. But the problem with these platforms is vendor lock-in: once you use them, you’re stuck paying whatever they want to charge you! Sorry, but I’m not paying Squarespace $25 per month (16$ on the annual plan) to host a website that I can’t even export if I want to switch to another platform! 😡
That left me looking for something in the middle: a tool that I could use to create my own website from scratch, without the limitations of a WYSIWYG editor. Most of all, I wanted a site with $0 recurring costs beyond what I’d already spent on software and a custom domain name.
Here’s how I went about building my own portfolio site in less than 5 days with hardly any coding experience.
