The Homepage card

Make your own personal website! Your own little corner of the internet, with you, your projects and whatever you’re into right now.

What counts

A website that’s about you and made by you. It can be a portfolio, a blog, a gallery of your art, a shrine to your favourite band… as long as it feels like yours.

Website builders like Wix, Squarespace or Carrd don’t count, since you’re not really building anything there. Same goes for downloading a portfolio template and swapping your name in. Static site generators (Hugo, Eleventy, Astro, Jekyll…) are totally fine, as long as the design is your own!

The easiest thing that counts

One index.html with a bit of CSS. Say hi, write a few lines about yourself, list some things you’ve made with links to them, and put it on GitHub Pages. That’s an evening of work!

…but please don’t stop there. The best personal sites are the ones that could only ever belong to one person.

Making it yours

Back in the late 90s, lots of people had a GeoCities page, and they were gloriously messy: tiled backgrounds, visitor counters, guestbooks, MIDI music that started playing the second you opened the page. Nobody was trying to look professional, and that’s exactly why they were fun. Plenty of people are bringing that energy back, and Neocities is full of personal sites worth getting lost in for an afternoon.

Some ideas to steal:

• A theme. Your site could be a desk you can click around, a fake desktop OS, a trading card, a level from a game you love…
• A /now page that says what you’re up to at the moment. It’s much easier to keep fresh than a whole blog! nownownow.com lists a few thousand of them.
• An 88x31 button. Those tiny banners that old sites used to link to each other! Make one for yourself so friends can link to you, and collect theirs.
• A guestbook, so visitors can leave you a note. You’ll need a little backend for it, which is a great excuse to learn how to make one.
• Secrets. A custom cursor, a Konami code easter egg, a page that only shows up at midnight… Reviewers love finding these.
• A blog with an RSS feed, if you like writing about the things you build.

Please don’t make it look like everyone else’s

There’s a look a lot of portfolio sites have right now: a dark background, a big gradient headline saying “Hi, I’m Alex 👋”, three cards with icons, and a “Let’s build something amazing together” button at the bottom. It’s usually what you get when you ask an AI to make you a portfolio, and we can spot it from a mile away.

This card is about you! Pick colours you actually like, a font you think is cool, and write the words yourself, in your own voice. A slightly wonky site that’s obviously yours beats a polished one that could be anybody’s.

Staying safe

Your site is public, and anyone can read it. You don’t need your full name, your school, your city or a photo of yourself on there. A nickname and your projects are plenty!

Hosting it

• GitHub Pages is free and great for plain HTML. Push to a repo, switch it on in the settings, and you’re live.
• Neocities is free too, and comes with a whole community of personal sites to browse.
• Vercel, Netlify and Cloudflare Pages are nice if you’re using a framework or a static site generator.
• Your own domain is a lovely touch, but you don’t need one. The GitHub Student Developer Pack has had free domain offers in the past, so have a look at what’s in it right now.

Shipping one

• Demo: the link to your live site.
• Screenshot: your homepage, as people see it when they first land on it.
• README: what’s on your site, how you built it, and the bit you’re proudest of. If there’s a secret hidden somewhere, you don’t have to tell us where… but a hint would be nice!