Can you afford your own website as a writer

Yes you can and yes there are other alternatives

Under the Hood

This is the question most writers or developers have in mind. Should they have their own blogging platform?

Can they afford their own website?

We will not talk about the importance of having your own website and how to make money.

We will discuss the tactical ways to develop your own website asap without investing too much cost.

No Code Website

If you are not a developer then a no-code platform is the only option you have.

Bubble, Wix and Framer and Notion all are the 3rd party platforms to build your own website without writing any code.

But seems like this might be a costly process as your website grow.

I haven’t used it so I don’t know the actual cost.

Code Website

This option seems interesting to me as I am a developer.

Again we need to think about cost and develop a cost-efficient website, in that case, having low servers and free databases will make sense.

You can easily develop your own website to share your blogs and you only need 2/3 things as following

• A frontend interface to show your blogs, each blog will have like, share functionality
• The frontend interface will have the subscribe form
• The frontend interface to write blogs and save them in the database
• Backend database to save blogs, likes and subscribers' data

Now, this is interesting, we ain’t need anything else because the rest the other features can be developed over time as your website traffic grows.

Honestly, in order to run your own website you only need to take care of growth and content.

For growth, you need more subscribers and for content, you need to push more blogs and that is the only thing we should focus on initially.

Tech Stack

I’ve already covered a story of 10 tech stacks to build any product in the world.

Below are the ones —

• Next.JS
• Vercel
• Github
• Firebase Rest all are the small packages that will keep on adding in future but overall these tech stacks are necessary and will remain the same.

Cost Analysis

Let’s have a basic cost analysis.

These are the tech stack and tools you will need initially to build

• Database — Firebase and Supabase are free initially
• Frontend, Hosting— Hosting and framework are also free
• Domain — This is one time cost for 1/2 to 5 years Now the only cost I can see initially is the domain name cost and that is affordable for each and every one.

So initially the entire website development is not too costly and only time is the one that will be spared.

How to develop

This is a good question and I have a proper tactical plan of action with the clear objective to build your own blogging platform.

Objective -

Develop your own blogging website to write and share blogs just like a medium.

Tactics

The frontend interface to show all blogs
A single blog page to show the corresponding blog
Subscribe form in frontend
Admin page or editor to write and post blogs in the database
Now the execution part depends on you as a developer.

Blogging Starter Kit Repository

If you don’t have time or experience in building such a platform on your own and you don’t want to use the no-code tool then I made this starter kit to develop and run your blogging website.

This repository contains

• Frontend interface shows all the blogs fetched from the database
• A single blog page to render the blog
• Subscribe form
• Admin page to manage and write blogs in one place
• The Firebase database is already connected
• Responsiveness handled
• Top and latest tech stacks such as Next.js, Tailwind CSS, React Query, Firebase, Redux

• Dark and white theme inbuilt
  Each and every instruction are mentioned in the description and in the template itself.

• You just download the repository

• Add your Firebase database config in the next.config.js file

• Go to the /admin page and write your article

• Post article in the database

Get the template

Conclusion

Only 2 ways to have your own blogging platform

• No-code tools
• Build your own
• No code might lead to heavy costs, building your own will take time but it will be yours and you will have complete control.

Use the template, and blogging starter kit to make your own blogging platform.

Until next time, have a good day, people

Shrey

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