These days, creating a personal website is pretty easy. You don’t need to know about web hosting or code—the newest kids on the block are hosted profile pages with templates you can fill in with photos, links, and text about yourself. It’s a whole new generation of MySpace for those of you that are old enough to remember that gem. You don’t even have to have tons of content for subpages—just one landing page is all you need to stake out your spot on the web.

So, it’s easy, but is it necessary?

If you’re a media, digital, or creative professional—absolutely. Same goes if you want to otherwise establish yourself as an expert in anything and don’t already have your own professional blog. If you’re in a traditionally non-creative field with structured recruitment and hiring methods, such as accounting or law, a personal website might not help you as much professionally. But if you have a side hustle or hobby and you’re active in the online community, then a personal site can be helpful to grow that online influence, too. Here are three reasons why.

1. You Control Your Branding

Most personal website services allow you to customize everything from background photos to fonts and text placement—so, unlike LinkedIn’s uniform profile, your personality and brand can shine through. When someone finds you, they’ll have an instant, visual representation of who you are. (A couple of my faves: product designer Liang Shi and marketing strategist Lindsay Kaplan .)

2. It’s an Instant Portfolio

People are visual, so the more you can show (rather than tell), the better. Your resume may say that you “built a company blog following of 15,000 engaged readers,” but with your personal site, you can take someone straight to the blog and show why it’s so engaging and what sets your work apart. By featuring work samples, sites you’ve worked on, articles you’ve written, whatever, your personal homepage can act as a digital portfolio of your online work and identity.

3. You Point Recruiters in the Right Direction

Though only 40% of companies use social media as part of their screening process , many more use it informally (and in my experience, hiring managers and interviewers who may not be on the HR side usually do their own research, too). So consider this: If a recruiter sees your resume and tries to find you on LinkedIn or Facebook , you could get lost among the other professionals who share your name. But if you have a personal website aggregating your various networks (and put that URL on your resume), you take all the guesswork out of finding you.

What type of website do I need?

1. No Cost

There are plenty of easy (and free) services you can use to put up a quick profile, such as About.me, Flavors.me, DooID, and Zerply. Some of these sites allow you to create subpages or pull in your social media feeds, while About.me is a great choice if you just need a basic landing page.

By and large, your URL will be the website name + your username (for example, about.me/GeoffBlair), though most services will let you point a custom domain (i.e., yourname.com) to your profile.

There are a few reasons you might choose this type of online presence:

1. You don’t need to point your customers or friends to a location on the web that will always be yours.
2. You only have an idea for a website or web page and want to see if your idea will work before you upgrade to a real website.
3. You want to get your feet wet by building something on the internet without the need to learn to code.

2. Low Cost ($20 – $60)

This is the easiest of all possible options because there are so many companies that want to provide a very inexpensive service. Most hosting companies are more than happy to take between $20 to $60 dollars per year to provide the domain name (if it isn’t taken) and the hosting space (storage) for your website on the internet.

There are several concerns that must be addressed at this stage, including Host Uptime, Customer Service availability and an easy user interface.

With Uptime you want to find a host that is large enough to provide extreme reliability. This is just a measure of how likely they are as a company to have your website be offline for problems that are on their end. The larger the company the more likely that your website will always be available. Several large companies advertise 99.99% Uptime.

Customer service availability is what it sounds like. How likely is it that when my website does have problems, that I will be able to call someone and figure out what is broken. A lot of large providers sell I.T. service help, so while they are always available, it’s going to cost you if you can’t figure it out on your own.

The final topic of concern is the User Interface for the provider. I’ve seen them all, from the crappy third world nation indecipherables to the top of the line commercial products that are always receiving upgrades and refinements. The important thing to remember is that a company that is making money will be spending it on great UI programmers. These companies make it easy and logical to figure out what you need to be doing to get your product online without too much hassle.

Low cost websites are easy to purchase, but they do assume you will have some technical knowledge. They do provide the best and cheapest means of getting a professional website online in the shortest amount of time, but once you have purchased your small part of the internet, you will need a lot of experience creating the actual website. It can be done as a novice, but everyone who views your page will know you were a novice when you built it.

Let’s Get Started

Now that you know what type of website will work for you, and you have an idea of a budget to make it work, we need to start filling in the blanks. The easiest way to do that though is to call in a little help. Call the guy who has been actively building and selling websites for more than 20 years now. We will talk about your budget, and what you hope to accomplish. We will talk about your websites name, it’s overall look and how it feels to your customers. The best part about all of this, is that it’s free. Give me a call. I enjoy building fun successful websites and working with dreamers.