Are you good at yapping?

Last week I told you my story of how I cancelled Squarespace and built my own website on my own server.

But I worry I didn't do a good enough job explaining just how easy it is to create your own site and why you should.

Why

Do me a favor and Google yourself real quick.

You're already online, and I believe the first thing people find should be something you made yourself.

You should have your own place online that you control.

It's better than a social media profile or a platform page because it's yours, completely yours to do exactly what you want with it.

Have you ever gone to a conference and given somebody a business card? A website's better.

Have you ever wanted people to come to you rather than you go to them? A website works for you all day and all night.

It helps people find you and learn from you.

And over and over again, I've seen it help people find their next job or their next client.

Whatever dreams you have, whatever things you want to do with your life, I guarantee you that creating a website will make those things happen easier.

But How

This used to be complicated and it scared millions of people away.

Even the best services used to take hours to learn.

But things have changed.

Are you good at yapping?

That's all you need to do now.

Easy as 1, 2, 3

1. Start with Claude.

This is my favorite tool. Open it up and tell it you want a website for yourself. Give it some ideas, examples, talk to it for a bit. It will start creating an Artifact right there in the app.

But everything lives inside Claude for the moment. That's okay. You could send it to people and you could improve it right there.

Congratulations, you started your site! Grab a soda or high five your kid, the first step's done.

2. Make it live online.

If you want to have an actual domain, like yourname.com that's easy too. Go to Cloudflare and buy any domain you want. It's just $10 for the year. This is the only step that will cost you any money.

Now go back to Claude, click on Connectors and connect your Cloudflare. Tell Claude you bought a domain and you want to take the website you just made and put it on that domain. Claude will do it all for you.

Now go visit yourname.com that you just bought and it should be there.

The hosting fees? Cloudflare will host it for free forever.

You might be thinking, "It can't be that easy."

It is.

3. There is no three.

I tricked you. It's as easy as 1, 2. There is no three.

If you want to make things fancier you can. I do that all day long, but you don't have to. Ask Claude to teach you about Github and how you can save your website there as it evolves. That's free too.

Want to make a fun web app like a gratitude app, or a quotes app, or a jokes app that can live on your site? You can do that for free. Just ask Claude.

There's no end to the fun and awesome things that you can build on your site, but you have to start somewhere.

And I believe that $10 above is the best investment I can think of to get you started on this path of building something amazing for yourself.

Everyone deserves to have a website they love.

And everyone should feel empowered to learn how things are built online and how to build things themselves online.

You're smart enough.

You matter enough.

And the world needs to hear from you.

We need to hear your passion and your excitement about the things that you believe in and put into the world.

We want to be surrounded by others who care about their communities and their hobbies and their kids and their neighbors.

We love hearing about your little quirks and the crazy little things you do. Maybe you love LEGO, or Honda Type Rs, or crocheting little hats for your dog, or 3D printing flexi-dragons for kids in your neighborhood.

Maybe you have big dreams for your life and for the world.

We need to hear all of that and we need to hear it from you directly.

Maybe you've gotten this far and you still don't believe me.

Okay, let me prove it.

This week I'm going to help somebody build a site for themselves, for free, in public, so I can show you just how easy it is.

I've created a little page here and I'd love for you to sign up. It's at travishellstrom.com/free

We'll record a video, do everything live and show everyone just how easy the process is.

I'll report back so you can learn from it either way.

At the end of the day it isn't actually about building the website.

It's about you learning the skills to build things yourself.

I'm here for you and I'm right here with you.

Let's do this together.

The internet should be a much more fun and personal place.

Let's start with us.