Assumptions: 1. Your main goal is to make it easy for people who are interested in you to look you up, become even more interested, and decide to follow you. 2. You don't want to write code. _You may need more than 3 hours if you’re not willing to make quick decisions about what domain to buy, what Twitter handle to use, what styles to pick, etc._ ## Step 1. Make your homepage using [Carrd](https://carrd.co/)\* Cost: $19 / year Update 2023-07-26: [Biosites](https://biosites.com/) is a new-ish free service from Squarespace. If you just want a page that shows your email address and a list of links to your other online profiles, that is probably a better option than Carrd. I didn't try it yet. ### Step 1a. Create free accounts with Twitter and MailChimp. Add these and any other places you want people to follow you to your homepage. N.B. You don’t need to be active on Twitter or send regular emails to your mailing list. Interested people will follow you anyway and you can just post when it suits you. ## Step 2. [Buy a domain name](https://www.hover.com/) and [point it to your Carrd site](https://carrd.co/docs/sites/using-a-custom-domain). Cost: $15 / year ## Alternatives to Carrd The Carrd templates are nice, but a bit boring. If you want to make something more fun, try [Mmm.page](https://build.mmm.page/). Carrd is not suitable for blogging. If you want to blog, one cheap and easy approach is to create a Carrd homepage and link from there to your [Medium](https://medium.com) or [Substack](https://substack.com) page. If you want to blog directly on your homepage (perhaps to accumulate search ranking on a domain you control), or you want more flexibility, skip Carrd and make your homepage using [Webflow](https://webflow.com/), [Ghost](https://ghost.org), [WordPress.com](https://wordpress.com/) or [Squarespace](https://squarespace.com) instead. If you want to make a notes website like this one, use [Obsidian Publish](https://publish.obsidian.md). C.f. [[How to start a blog in 5 seconds for $0]].