It is so very important for a designer/developer, freelance or otherwise, to have their own site. Personal branding is a crucial part of doing business online. The advent of the Web has made the world an incredibly small place and so competition for work can be fierce. One way to combat that is by building a strong brand for yourself, getting information about what you’re good at out into the public, and proving value with examples.

If you are a designer, developer, entrepreneur, or just someone that wants to get their name out there; I suggest following Jonathan’s lead. Kudos Jon, nice step forward.

Especially on today’s Internet. I’ve had “my own site” for as long as I’ve ever been online. It all started on some Geocities and Tripod powered sites in the mid-90s. Then, when I switched from using AOL  (read: When I finally realized AOL was not the Internet.), I used some shared space on Prodigy.net, my ISP at the time. It wasn’t long before I discovered the world of Web development and purchased a domain (then called colinspage.com) for around $70 per year.

Fast forward about a year and a few of my friends put together a Star Wars related news site called thehutt.net. I didn’t help out too much with the design and development but I did write some for the site.  It wasn’t long after that when I wanted to scratch my own itch and had my own blog.  Which ended up turning towards theubergeeks.net, and now I have cdevroe.com.

I think having your own Web site is a valuable thing, especially for those of us that work on the Web.  It helps you stay in touch with what people are going through when they want to publish content online, edit some code, or even customize an open source project.  There are countless lessons to be learned by having your own site to fiddle with.

Great work Kyle. I’ll check in on you and your site(s) in 14 years.

Source: Kyle Slattery.com.