How to Build Your Own Website with Zero Investment
Background
I've always wanted to build my own personal portfolio website, but I never had enough time. On top of that, UI and visual design have never been my strongest skills.
With the current economic situation, however, I suddenly have something I didn't have before—time. Thanks to AI, designing a website has become much easier than it used to be. That gave me the motivation to finally invest my time into building my own portfolio, hoping it might help me connect with future employers or clients.
Technology
As I mentioned earlier, the economic situation in Indonesia has been challenging. Income is tight, while living costs continue to rise due to the weakening currency. Because of that, I've become much more careful about where I spend my money.
My goal was simple: build a professional website while spending as close to zero as possible.
Here's the technology stack I ended up using:
- Hosting: GitHub Pages (gh-pages) — Free static website hosting.
- CMS: TinaCMS — Allows me to manage blog content without a database. Every article, including this one, is stored directly in my GitHub repository.
- Comments: Giscus — Uses GitHub Discussions as the comment system, so there's no need for a separate database or backend.
- Analytics & SEO: Google Analytics and Google Search — for the analytics and SEO enhancements. Both are free and come with excellent learning resources.
That's it! Most of this website is powered by GitHub and a collection of excellent free tools.
To be completely transparent, this website isn't entirely free. I still pay for my custom domain name and occasionally use AI services to speed up development. However, I try to keep those costs as low as possible by writing most of the code myself whenever I can, which also helps reduce AI token usage.
Closing
Thanks for taking the time to read this article!
If you're also trying to build a website on a tight budget, I'd love to hear about your experience. Feel free to leave a comment below and let's discuss different approaches to creating websites with little—or even zero—cost.