Transcript of ‘Why it isn’t time to kill the personal website’

I’ve just read an article on The Next Web entitled “Time to kill the personal website” and I couldn’t disagree more. I understand the arguments that they are making that activity is happening on different social media websites and it’s happening on different blogging platforms so it’s things like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Medium. But that doesn’t mean to say that the personal or indeed the corporate website is dead.

The whole point about a personal or corporate website is it’s a place that you own and control. You can aggregate and signpost people to all of the activity and the content elsewhere or vice versa you can use the activity elsewhere and the content elsewhere to signpost people back to  to your website.

It’s better to own your own house then to rent it.

You know the problem with putting all of your activity on to third party platforms is you don’t know what’s going to happen to them. Just imagine if you were a short-form video content producer and you’d bet everything on Vine – Twitter’s six-second video platform that no longer exists. Far better to actually focus on creating video then maybe I make it available in a variety of different formats.

You can still embed the video, you can still use Vine, you can still use Instagram short videos. You can put short videos onto Snapchat. But then you can actually syndicate them all and centralise them on to your personal or corporate website. That’s the way you should be doing it. It doesn’t mean to say you’re not going to have activity on all of these other places. You just need to have a place you can control and collate all of the things that you’ve done.