This is a companion website for my talk on October 5, 2026 (10:45am) at The Marketer Collaborative for StartupCincy Week.
This is a simple website--because websites can be simple! Talk attendees will buy a personal domain and set up a tiny personal website during the session.
To prepare for this talk, I wrote an essay on why you might want a personal website: Your corner of the internet . In short, a personal website can be a low stakes creative outlet or a powerful career building tool. (It has been both for me.)
There are tons of domain registrars, like GoDaddy and Squarespace. To keep things simple today, I'll recommend Cloudflare. The going rate for a .com domain is $10.46.
There are hundreds of top-level domains—the part to the right of the dot in a URL, like .com, .nyc, and .pizza—but if in doubt start with yourname.com.
Whatever you want, really. Here are some ideas to get your wheels turning:
And some bloggy things:
The code for the very simplest websites isn't scary. Here's some HTML:
<h1>NAME</h1> <p>Hello, internet!</p>
The h1 means it's a top heading, and the p means paragraph. There are a million and one ways to make a website, but for now, to make a tiny website in just a few minutes, create a file called index.html in a text editor (TextEdit on Mac, Notepad on Windows) and copy-paste that HTML above.
Or, if you'd like to ask ChatGPT or Claude to generate your HTML, copy-paste (and, optionally, edit) the prompt below. But keep it simple!
I want to make a super tiny, simple personal website. Can you make a
minimal index.html file that I can upload to Cloudflare Drop. Do not
write any copy at all or add any styling--I will write the prose, and we
can add styles as follow-up.
You can open that HTML file in a web browser on your computer while you edit. Then upload your HTML file to Cloudflare Drop. In Cloudflare, add the domain you bought earlier to your new HTML file, and you'll have a website on the public internet.
No one will go to your website unless you send them a link (and even then they probably won't visit!). You can also create pages that aren't linked from anywhere else, to quietly plant things on your website.
Yes, LLMs can write code for you, and nowadays AI agents can even put your code on a live URL. Beware of ballooning cost and complexity, but here are some tools for "vibe coding":
I'd just ask that you don't publish slop! Keep your website your own. For getting started, though, I'd sooner recommend a simpler, fun tool like mmm.page. Manu Moreale maintains a good list of blogging platforms.