How to make a personal website without code

A personal website used to mean learning a little HTML, renting hosting and wrestling with a theme. Plenty of people still enjoy that, and it is a good hobby. But if you just want a place on the web that is yours, with your name, your work and a way to reach you, you can skip the technical part completely.

This guide walks through making a small personal site without writing a line of code. The hard part is not the tools. It is deciding what to say. So most of the guide is about that.

Decide what the site is for

A personal website can be many things: a calling card, a home for side projects, a place to point people after you meet them, a quiet journal. Trying to be all of them at once is how personal sites end up half finished.

Pick one main job and write it down. "A place to send people who ask what I make." "A home for my bird photos and the stories behind them." "Somewhere a future employer can see what I care about." That sentence decides what goes on the first screen and what can wait.

If you are torn between a full site and a simple link page, read personal website or link in bio first. Many people find that a small site with a short list of links is the right middle ground.

Write before you design

It is tempting to start by picking colors. Resist it for twenty minutes and write four things instead:

1. A heading: your name, or the name of the thing.
2. An introduction of one or two sentences, in your own voice.
3. Your main link, with a label that says what happens next.
4. A contact line you are comfortable maintaining.

For a gardener who writes about balcony plants, that could be: "Ama's balcony", "I grow far too much on a very small balcony and write down what works", "Read the latest balcony notes", and "Say hello about seeds or swaps". That is already a website. Everything else is extra.

Choose a scene that fits the story

Mini Casa sites are built on illustrated scenes, called casas, so the design is done for you. Your job is to choose one that matches your mood. Lunar Post Office has a tiny postal worker and a very large universe, which suits people who collect faraway friends and small signals. Book Nook is a warm reading room for writers and readers. Secret Greenhouse is all plants and a patient snail, a natural home for anything that grows slowly.

Once you pick one, Casa DNA lets you change the supported details, such as the palette, season or the objects around the resident. Lock the details you like, shuffle the rest and keep going until it feels like a place you would want to visit. You are not editing code or CSS. You are choosing from options the design already supports.

Add a little depth with posts

A heading and a link make a page. A few posts make it feel lived in. A post can be a short note, an image with a caption, a link with a sentence about why it matters, or a project. On the free plan you have room for 6 posts, links or portfolio pieces, which is plenty for a first version.

Good first posts are small and specific. A photo of the thing you are working on with one line about it. A link to an article you wrote, with why you are proud of it. A note about what you are learning this month. The posts feature explains drafts, pinning and ordering. Drafts stay private until you publish them, so you can write without an audience watching.

A small example, start to finish

Here is how this looks for a real kind of person. Theo teaches piano and records odd little covers on weekends. His purpose sentence is "a place to send parents who ask about lessons, and friends who ask about the recordings". His heading is his name. His introduction says he teaches beginners of any age near the river and records covers badly but happily.

His main link books a trial lesson. His contact line invites questions about lesson times. He picks Book Nook because it feels like a music room with a lamp on, warms the palette and adds two posts: a link to a short recording and a note about how first lessons work. That took one evening, and it answers every question he used to get by message.

Keep it honest and current

The most common problem with personal websites is not bad design. It is old information. A site that says you are "currently working on" something from three years ago quietly tells visitors you are not around.

Write things that age well. "I make..." instead of "I am currently...". Avoid dates in the introduction unless you plan to update them. Remove links that no longer lead anywhere useful. A small site with three true things beats a large site with ten stale ones.

What you do not need to worry about

You do not need to buy a domain to start. You can publish at your free Mini Casa address and decide later. Connecting a domain you already own is an optional step on a paid plan, and custom domains are currently in preview. If you want the background, choosing your web address covers the trade-offs.

You do not need hosting, plugins, security updates or a build process. You do not need to know what a CSS file is. You do need to come back now and then and check that the site still sounds like you.