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Ask HN: How to build a personal landing page?
20 points by grenzreiter 3466 days ago
Okay, so I got a domain with my personal name (http://korbinian-michl.de/) about two years ago. Since then I linked a mostly empty Tumblr page to it, which says: Hi. This guy does things on- and offline.

Now I want a simple landing page. Some text what I am doing, some photos, links to my social media stuff and that. But I need help. How to do it? I never "build" website outside the wordpress.com and tumblr universe. Any help is appreciated.

9 comments

I highly recommend Bootstrap and Github Pages. S3 also works but is a little more complex to setup in my opinion. Bootstrap gives you abstractions in the form of CSS classes to help you quickly build a website. The other helpful beginner feature is the vast array of Bootstrap themes, templates, and addons. The ubiquity of Bootstrap has spawned a thriving ecosystem of resources and tutorials even if modern web developers may sneer at it.
Use Gitlab Pages to setup a homepage (learn some git basics as a side effect).

Official Tutorial: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/pages/README.html

My write-up, geared towards beginners: https://automizzen.com/blog/setup-gitlab-pages/

I suggest using Hugo to build your site after setting up Gitlab Pages: http://gohugo.io

Create and download your landing page here: http://launchaco.com/build/.

Download the files and Host them at Github Pages.

Edit the html with your copy.

All of it (HTML and how to create a Github Pages site) is very easy to learn googling it. And it is free.

If you have any coding experience, (you don't really need any experience). I would recommend the following:

1) Get a free html5 single page template

2) Edit the site with your customization

3) Get a s3 bucket and upload your website files there

4) Use route 53 to redirect your domain to this bucket

5) NOW YOU HAVE A SITE!

If you are interested in more details, I wouldn't mind writing something up, I was planning on writing a blog on this anyways.

You can skip the S3/route 53 step by using something like http://surge.sh/
I can recommend to use Hugo [0] as static website generator. They have plenty of themes [1] to choose from. You can still adjust it with basic knowledge in HTML/CSS. Afterwards you can chose where to host it. You can use Github Pages [2] for free or pay for a service like DigitalOcean [3]. I wrote a technical cheatsheet [4] on how to setup your own website with these ingredients.

- [0] https://gohugo.io/

- [1] http://themes.gohugo.io/

- [2] https://pages.github.com/

- [3] https://www.digitalocean.com/

- [4] http://www.robinwieruch.de/own-website-in-five-days/

Sounds like you need something similar to one I got for myself; http://halilk.com

It looks pretty simple at first glance. One TLDR sentence about my self. If visitor wants to see more, I expose more info on a bootstrap modal, such as showing the last ten book I read that I retrieve thru Goodreads API which is essentially populated from my kindle.

I also expose useless information like the last song I've listened on Spotify. There is also an Instagram footer showing random 8 photos at the bottom of the page along with the other social links.

Hosted at GitHub pages implemented with pure JS + Bootstrap. Feel free to copy and customise as you wish; https://github.com/ibo549/ibo549.github.io

If you only want a welcome page and no articles, the easiest way is to use http://about.me
I recently made a thing that can do this for you in < 60 seconds: https://www.typa.io
fyi, the site does not load with 'www'. You may want to fix the A record and CNAME settings.