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How To Build A Website in 2026

2021-04-11 · Long video (solo, talking head or whiteboard) · Ali · recording, 22:01 · watch on YouTube

Topic: YouTube, writing online and creators (also: Tools, apps and tech) · mode: Explanation and tutorial

Ali says everyone should have a personal website and explains why (six benefits, shown through his housemate Sheen's blog), how to set one up (a platform such as Substack, Squarespace or Ghost plus a domain of about $10 a year), and what to do with it: three pages, a weekly blog post shared on social media, no worrying about design, SEO or money at first.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Making a website is easy these days; what the video covers

  • ★★★ Ali has made websites since about the age of 12; starting his personal website in 2016 was one of the best decisions of his life and ultimately led to his YouTube channel. — 00:00:00 · aliabdaal.com

00:00:58 — Six benefits of a personal website, with Sheen's blog as the example

  • ★★★ Benefit one of a personal website, Ali says, is developing your own ideas: through weekly blog posts on women's empowerment and PhD life, his housemate Sheen became a better writer and communicator. — 00:00:58 · Sheen
  • ★★★ Benefit two is professional: Sheen started her website in June 2020, and when she applied for jobs, interview panels had Googled her and found her blog, which acted as an online CV. — 00:01:27 · Sheen
  • ★★ Whatever your professional field, Ali says, a prospective employer will Google you, and your own website lets you put your best foot forward. — 00:02:01
  • ★★ Benefit three of a website you write on regularly is connections: people from around the world have reached out to Sheen after reading her blog. — 00:02:01 · Sheen
  • ★★ Benefit four is opportunities: people who found Sheen's blog have invited her to write for publications, onto podcasts and interviews, and to speak at global health events. — 00:03:02 · Sheen
  • ★★★ Benefit five is impact: having a presence on the internet, Ali says, is the modern-day equivalent of being very good at networking. — 00:03:23
  • ★★ Ali compares refusing any online presence to staying confined to your village, meeting only people from work, while writing online is like visiting a different village every weekend. — 00:03:53
  • ★★ Benefit six is that you can monetise a personal website, but Ali says it should not be the main reason, since it generally takes a solid few years of regular work before it makes money. — 00:04:22
  • ★★ Ali has many blogger and YouTuber friends around the world who make $100,000 to over a million dollars a year from their websites. — 00:05:12
  • ★★★ The value of a personal website you write on regularly, Ali says, is that it acts as a serendipity vehicle, his friend David Perell's term: your work is shared on the internet even while you sleep. — 00:05:12

00:05:45 — A platform: Substack for free, Squarespace or Ghost if you can pay

  • ★★★ Ali thinks every single person watching should start a personal website straight after the video. — 00:05:45
  • ★★ To create a website, Ali says, you need just two things: a platform that hosts it and a domain. — 00:05:45
  • ★★ Substack is totally free, easy to start and has an email newsletter built in, Ali says, but it is more a newsletter than a website, without your own domain. — 00:06:43
  • ★ As a boy of 13 or 14 without money of his own, Ali spent years searching for free ways to start a website. — 00:07:42
  • ★★ For anyone who cannot pay for anything, Ali says to just make an account on Substack. — 00:08:09
  • ★★★ To people who can afford web hosting but expect everything online to be free, Ali says not to be a cheapskate: a website is genuinely the sort of investment that can change your life. — 00:08:32
  • ★★★ Ali tells total computer beginners, like his housemate Sheen, to just use Squarespace, adding that Squarespace does not sponsor the video. — 00:09:01 · Squarespace, Sheen
  • ★★ Squarespace is easy and costs $13 a month, Ali says, and paying for a year upfront also gives a free .com domain name. — 00:09:01 · Squarespace
  • ★★★ For anyone who knows a little about computers, Ali personally recommends Ghost, which he says he absolutely loves. — 00:09:29 · Ghost
  • ★★ Ghost is open-source software from an entirely remote company, Ali says, and its hosting service, Ghost Pro, costs $9 a month. — 00:09:29 · Ghost
  • ★★ Ali has hosted his own website on Ghost since 2016 and is friends with the founder of Ghost. — 00:09:29 · Ghost, aliabdaal.com
  • ★★★ Ali recommends three website platforms, Substack, Squarespace and Ghost, calls them all pretty good, and says not to overthink the choice. — 00:10:13 · Squarespace, Ghost
  • ★★★ The biggest mistake in making a website, Ali says, is thinking the platform matters: having a website and writing decent content for it every week gives 99.9% of the value. (overstated) — 00:10:13

00:11:00 — A domain, Namecheap or Google Domains, and why setting up is easy now

  • ★★ Ali says a platform address such as aliabdaal.ghost.io is not very pretty and looks a bit amateur, which is partly why Substack looks amateur. — 00:11:11
  • ★★ A domain such as aliabdaal.com costs around $10 a year, Ali says, less than a dollar a month. — 00:11:11 · aliabdaal.com
  • ★ Linking your own domain to Substack costs an extra $50, Ali says. — 00:11:42
  • ★★ Students can get a free .me domain from Namecheap, Ali says, which is less pro-looking than .com but very reasonable for a personal blog. — 00:11:42
  • ★★ Ali recommends Namecheap and Google Domains as domain registrars, though he says the registrar does not really matter. — 00:12:25
  • ★ Ali used Namecheap for his domains for ten years and only recently switched to Google Domains. — 00:12:25
  • ★★ With a platform and a connected domain, Ali says, a website takes maybe five or ten minutes to set up. (hedged) — 00:12:25
  • ★★ When Sheen asked him how to start her website, Ali told her to go to squarespace.com and figure it out; she hated him for throwing her in the deep end. — 00:12:54 · Sheen, Squarespace
  • ★★ Making a website was hard around 2005, when Ali made his first ones, but in 2021, he says, it is very easy: sign up on Squarespace or Ghost and you are done. — 00:13:23 · Squarespace, Ghost
  • ★★ People who get hung up on free hosting options such as Netlify or Heroku, Ali says, are focusing on the wrong things and are usually not the people who write something every week. — 00:13:53

00:14:22 — Three pages, a blog post every week, what to write and how people find it

  • ★★★ A personal website needs only three pages, Ali says: an about page, a contact page and a blog page; the homepage can be the about page or the latest post. — 00:14:22
  • ★★★ The real objective of a new website, Ali says, is a blog post every week: once a week builds the habits of writing, publishing and showing your work. — 00:14:22 · show your work
  • ★★★ Ali's only bar for what to write about is whether it could be useful to at least one other person, such as insights from a book or a podcast episode, or life as a first-year medical student. — 00:15:07
  • ★★★ Ali often comes back to Gary Vaynerchuk's "document, don't create": thinking of documenting what you do anyway makes ideas to write about easy to find. — 00:16:06 · Gary Vaynerchuk, show your work
  • ★★ Starting a blog from scratch with no audience, Ali would document how he lives: his morning routine, articles he read, and books with a short summary and an Amazon link. — 00:16:06
  • ★★★ Ali says to set a goal of publishing every week for the next two years, and he can pretty much guarantee your life will change in an interesting way. — 00:17:04
  • ★★★ So that people see your blog posts, Ali says to share each one on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook or wherever you have social media. — 00:17:33 · Twitter, Instagram, Facebook
  • ★★ Ali says you should have a Twitter account, which he calls amazing for professional networking, and probably LinkedIn too if you are into the professional side. — 00:17:33 · Twitter
  • ★★ Without an audience at the start, Sheen got her first readers by posting about her blog on Instagram, where she had a few hundred followers, and on LinkedIn. — 00:18:02 · Sheen, Instagram
  • ★★★ People find most personal websites, Ali says, not through search engine optimisation but because the author shared them on social media and someone shared them wider. — 00:18:32
  • ★★ At the start nobody will read your writing, Ali says, because it is probably not very good yet; that is okay, as it improves over time. — 00:19:01
  • ★★ When Ali started his YouTube channel and blog, nobody read or watched: his YouTube videos got about 23 views, because they were not very good. — 00:19:01

00:19:30 — Frequent questions: design, SEO, monetising

  • ★★★ Ali says not to worry about how a personal website looks: Ghost and Squarespace are pretty by default, and people care about the writing. — 00:19:30 · Ghost, Squarespace
  • ★★ For the first four years Ali's website used the default free Ghost theme, which people praised; he now uses a custom design. — 00:19:59 · Ghost, aliabdaal.com
  • ★★★ Ali says to ignore search engine optimisation: a personal website is very unlikely to get reasonable traffic from it, and it can wait three years. — 00:20:29
  • ★★★ Unless you have been writing weekly for at least one to two years, Ali says, you need not worry about monetising your website. — 00:20:58

00:21:27 — The fear of putting yourself out there: a pointer to his writing-online video, and sign-off

  • ★★ By 2016 Ali had wanted to set up a website for years but never did because he was too scared. — 00:21:27 · aliabdaal.com

Threads in this video

Mentioned

Central: aliabdaal.com · Ghost · Sheen · Squarespace · Substack

Also: People: David Perell · Gary Vaynerchuk · John O'Nolan · Richard Wiseman · Seth Godin

Works: 59 Seconds · The Tim Ferriss Show

Organizations: Facebook · Instagram · LinkedIn · Namecheap · Twitter

Concepts: serendipity vehicle · show your work

Products: Google Domains · Wix · WordPress

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