Over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen Meta push anti-LGBQT “moderation” policies and TikTok shut down after being banned by the US government — further confirmation that no social media site will last forever and anyone who needs to reach folks via the internet should build their own independent presence and contacts.

So how the heck do we do that? Based on 26 years of internet self-promotion starting with my 1999 AOL Hometown page, I’m pretty comfortable offering the following simple strategy:

1. Make your own website, one of your very own that no one else controls, with your own custom domain name. (This is easier than it sounds — the website can be super simple — I’ll explain shortly!)
2. Then start a newsletter (making sure the newsletter service allows you to export and move your subscribers) and link it to your website.
3. Plug your website and newsletter on your social media accounts and whenever you do events so you build your own mailing list that will endure no matter what. Now when the social media site dies or gets overwhelmed by bigots, you still have a way to connect with folks who like your stuff.
4. Yes, we should all be blogging, too… but that’s an added bonus and we’ll talk about that at the end.
5. Pat yourself on the back! Now you have some independence and options and will be left just a little less desperate when the next social media site craters!

Read on for a very practical rundown of how all these steps work, concluding with an HTML template for setting up a very basic but totally serviceable static website!

1. Register your own domain name

The first step in establishing a web presence that endures no matter what is to register your own domain name — gregpak.com, for example, is my main domain and my business home base. When you maintain your own domain (and point it to your own website), people will always be able to find you, no matter what happens to any social media service. A bunch of different companies provide domain registration services; I use Dynadot, which charges reasonable fees and has a good management interface. (If you use this referrer link to Dynadot, you’ll get a small discount and I’ll get a small commission over there.)

A key part of picking your domain name is clarity and simplicity — you want something that immediately identifies it as you or your business, that you can easily say out loud (when you’re interviewed on a podcast, for example), and that folks have a chance of remembering. Sadly, your first choices for an old school .com or .net domain have probably been taken over the last few decades. But these days, you’ve got more options with TLDs .link, .monster, and .fyi — and some are really cheap!

Still, be careful with the newer TLDs — as I understand it, some of the cheaper, newer TLDs are more prone to misuse by spammers. So especially if you’re planning to use your domain for email, it might be safer to stick with a .com or .net to avoid the possibility of ISPs preemptively blocking your messages. For what it’s worth, I haven’t had any trouble with folks visiting my gregpak.nexus or gregpak.link websites, although I haven’t tried running email through those domains.

Also please note that when you register your domain, you have to list contact information, including an address, that’s shared with the public. For privacy’s sake, I always recommend taking out a mail box and using that for your contact address. But you can and should also pick the domain privacy option that good domain registers offer. When you enable domain privacy, the registrar replaces your address with its own in the public record. The registrar will then forward any communications to you, but your actual contact info remains private.

2. Make your own website!

Just like that, huh? Yes, because it can be really simple! And you could probably get a basic but entirely serviceable web page up and running in about half an hour!

To be clear, we’re not talking about a website with an integrated blog or comments or much flash at all. But that’s not what we need at this point. To start with, we just need a simple, clean, attractive home page that lets folks know who you are, what you do, and provides the links to the stuff you’re pushing — like your newsletter and books or whatever. And that’s something you — yes, you! — can probably manage to put together and put online today at an independent webhost like neocities.org (which I love).

My friend Preeti Chhibber got me and a bunch of other writers hooked on neocities when she used it to create a brilliantly awful 1990s retro geocities-style site to promote her new book. I made my own retro 1990s site using actual old graphics and design from my actual 1999 website — and ended up falling in love all over again with those simple, effective design techniques.

To build a site using neocities, you just need a little bit of HTML knowledge, which you can pick up quickly through the Neocities Beginner tutorial or a fantastic and easy resource suggested by Scott Andrew called HTML for people.

And then you’re ready to try out template of an INCREDIBLY BASIC BUT STILL FUNCTIONAL personal website built in HTML that I put together based on my retro 1990s site! Feel free to check it out!

To nab the page source of that template, go to your browser toolbar and look for “Page Source” — in Firefox you can find it via Tools > Browser Tools > Page Source. Without even knowing much HTML, you can even learn as you go, pasting that template code into an index.html file in your Neocities folder, then looking through the code and replacing words like “your-link-here” with your own information.

The images you use should go into a folder called “pix” in your Neocities main folder. You’ll have to create that on your own; it’s not there by default.

I was thrilled to hear that someone made use of this template and uploaded her own website within an hour or two of my posting it! You can check out Kristen Thompson’s website to see it in action.

Is this the greatest webpage ever? Nope! Is it a barebones but functional home base that you can improve on? Heck, yes! And yes, please be assured that this is crappy code! Even kinda crappy for HTML in 1999! But it actually… works! Still! In 2025!

And as you get more confident and develop your own web design skills, you can improve and replace it whenever you want.

ALSO TOO: inspired by this template, the awesome Scott Andrew has posted a template for a webcomic page! Check it out!

3. Figure out your Privacy Policy

I am not a lawyer, so I am not offering any legal advice here. But as I understand it, laws such as the European Union’s GDPR require websites to post privacy policies that describe how they collect and use visitor’s data. According to webhost Wix.com, “your website must have a privacy policy letting visitors know what information you will collect, what you will do with it, how you’ll protect it and the recourse for privacy violations.”

The most barebones HTML websites may not collect any identifiable data from users. But that changes if collect any kind of stats or attach a newsletter or a blog with comments or any third party element that installs cookies or trackers. Since the plan I’m proposing includes a newsletter and possibly a blog, be sure to include those activities in your privacy policy as well.

Again, I’m not a lawyer can’t can’t advise on what should be in a privacy policy, but here are links from Wix and WordPress discussing the process:

https://www.wix.com/blog/how-to-write-website-privacy-policy

https://wordpress.com/go/website-building/how-to-write-and-add-a-privacy-policy-to-your-wordpress-site

4. Point your custom domain to your Neocities website

If you use Neocities for free, you get a default domain name like gregpak.neocities.org. But if you upgrade to $5 a month, you can have any custom domain you own point to your site. That’s what I did, so my Neocities site is now gregpak.nexus, which is hilarious.

(A nice bonus is that if you upgrade, you can also create multiple sites, each with their own domain. I’d bought the cheap domain gregpak.link on a whim, but now I’ve got it set up through Neocities as my Linktree replacement. So that’s nice!)

As discussed above, the big advantage of using your own domain name is that it’s easier to share with folks, and as search engines log the site and other pages link to your page, you establish your permanent presence online with a domain that you own and that never changes even if you change webhosting services.

To connect your custom domain to your website, you’ll have to change the DNS settings that your domain registration company maintains for you. Every webhost will have specific instructions on how to do that; I’ll just briefly go over how it works with Neocities and Dynadot.

1. Upgrade to the paid Neocities plan, which is currently $5 a month. (Only paid plans on Neocities can have custom domains.)
2. On Neocities, go to Settings > Sites > Manage Site Settings > Custom Domain. There you’ll see instructions about adding an “A record,” “AAAA record,” and “CNAME record” with your domain registrar.
3. On Dynadot, go to My Domains > Manage Domains > [Your domain here] > DNS Settings. You’re probably pre-set here with “Dynadot Parking”; from the dropdown menu, pick “Dynadot DNS.” Now under “Domain Record” you’ll be able to create the “A” and “AAAA” records that Neocities told you about. Just input the values Neocites gave you for each type. Under the “Sub-domain Records” input “www” as a Subdomain, CNAME as a record type, and your domain name as the “IP Address/Destination.”
4. Back on the the Neocities settings page, input your custom domain in the field in Step 6.

If all goes well, when you type your custom domain into a browser, it should now bring up your Neocities site. It may take a little time to fully propagate, i.e. for all the servers around the world to process the new directives, so be prepared for a little hinkiness for a bit. But it should be working properly within a few minutes or hours, and now you’ve got a home base on the internet that no one can take away from you!

If at some point you decide to switch webhosts or upgrade to a WordPress site with a blog, you can just backup whatever you need from Neocities, upload it to your new webhost or service, and then follow the new webhost’s instructions to update your DNS settings with your domain registrar so your domain name points to the new webhost.

One important privacy note about Neocities: by default the system creates a public “Feed” for your website that automatically posts on your public Neocities profile when you update your site. That’s a great idea in theory, but by default the system creates thumbnailed screenshots of your updated pages and shares them. That’s far less than ideal if you’re in the habit (like me) of “publishing” pages in secret before you link them to your home page for public consumption. I noticed those screenshots were showing pages-in-progress with unfinished or slug text, which I had no intention of sharing. So I deleted those updates and disabled my “Site Profile” in my settings.

5. Set up a newsletter

Yes, I know, setting up an email newsletter has become a cliché. But email remains the best way to stay in contact with folks online if and when social media sites collapse. So building a subscriber list of folks who want to get your updates remains the best current strategy for ensuring you can stay in touch with your greatest supporters.

For years, I used the newsletters built into my website hosting software, including the MailPoet plugin for WordPress. But mantaining that plugin took considerable time and effort, so this year I finally switched to an outside email newsletter service. When I asked on Bluesky, Alex De Campi recommended Buttondown, which I’ve been pretty happy with so far. (If you try out Buttondown, please feel free to use this referral link, which will get you a discount and me a commission.)

Several things sold me on Buttondown:

• First, it was affordable. With my number of subscribers, my MailPoet service was close to hitting the next subscription level, which would have cost me $20 or so more per month. Buttondown’s tiers will keep me at $29 per month until I hit 4000 subscribers, which will take a while.
• Second, I liked the interface for writing emails more. MailPoet is integrated with WordPress, which makes it very easy to access previously uploaded images. But it uses blocks to put emails together, which plenty of people love, but I find clunky. Buttondown allows for more straightforward writing with Markdown or a simple WYSIWYG system.
• Third, Buttondown has had spectacular customer service. I’ve had a few hinky moments during set up — including an import problem where the system only imported the creation date and not the confirmation date of each subscriber. But when I emailed support, I heard back very quickly with incredibly helpful information and service. (And yes, they fixed that problem for me.)
• Fourth, I can easily export my subscriber list from Buttondown and port it over to another service provider if ever want to. That’s an essential part of this entire strategy — being able to retain and control and move our contacts no matter what happens to our service providers.
• Fifth, Buttondown has a fantastic signup interface that does a great job of reminding people to confirm their subscriptions, which is required by modern privacy law and can sometimes be a tough thing to get folks to do.
• Finally, I’m not a lawyer, but as Buttondown has explained in their blog, newsletters are also required to include a mailing address in each email they send. Fortunately, Buttondown allows their customers to use their address for that purpose, which is a positive for me privacy-wise. (As noted earlier, I’ve also made sure to include my newsletter’s activity in my website’s privacy policy and included a link and language in my signup page that affirms subscribers agree to the privacy policy.)

Ghost and Behiiv and MailChimp are probably the most popular alternatives to Buttondown. I have friends or colleagues who use all of those, but I haven’t tried them out so I can’t comment directly about them.

6. What was that about blogging again?

With just a website and newsletter, you’re way ahead of the game. But I’m a huge proponent of bringing back old school blogging, which is what social media was before “social media” existed. A frequently updated blog gives visitors a general reason to visit your site and specific blog posts can bring in mass amount of traffic if they happen to catch on.

It’s absolutely possible to blog with a static HTML Neocities site – handcoding updates like we did back in 1999! You can see an example of that right here.

But if you’re going to do more extensive, serious blogging and updating and want more automation, you might consider upgrading to a dynamic website solution like WordPress. Many websites you wouldn’t think of as “blogs” are built with WordPress — it makes any kind of frequent updating much easier.

My business site, gregpak.com, runs on a WordPress.org installation on a private webhost. It was kind of a bear to set up and not something you’d wanna try on your own if you’ve never done that kind of thing before. But my personal/political blog, gregpak.net, runs on WordPress.com, which is a lot easier for beginners to manage. WordPress.com basically works like a webhosting company with preinstalled WordPress blogging software. So the blog is all set up for you from the beginning – you just customize it for your needs.

The big advantage of WordPress sites are that they have all the tools to manage lots of updates/pages/files and you can make changes to menus/widgets that apply throughout the entire site automatically – no need to correct each menu on every page by hand if you wanna tweak it, for example.

WordPress sites also do a pretty good job of looking “professional” out of the box, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage, in my book. There’s a kind of sameness to a lot of WordPress sites that can become… boring? But if you know HTML and are willing to learn some CSS, you can tweak the templates and make your site look and operate pretty much however you want. I wrote about my own adventures in making my 2025 WordPress a bit more user-friendly by using inspiration from my 1990s-retro site.

But WordPress is both a bit pricier than something like Neocities and, in my experience, requires more knowledge, attention, and maintenance to keep things running properly.

So another way to add a blog to your site is to use a service like Bearblog.dev, which was recommended to me by jess m. on Bluesky. I’ve just started fiddling with Bearblog, but I love its extreme simplicity and the ethos of its creator, Herman, who says he’s building software “to last forever.” You can also have a custom domain point to Bearblog, which helps keep it under your own branding and domain name. You can even make it part of your existing website by setting DNS to point to a Bearblog installation in a subdomain of your main domain. Right now, my testing Bearblog site lives at blog.gregpak.nexus, which I think means that if Bearblog.dev goes down and I can’t use the service any longer, I could conceivably rebuilt that subdomain with another host and fill it with static files of my archived blog.

7. Now we just gotta use ’em and share!

This article became longer and more detailed than I anticipated, but I hope that doesn’t make it intimidating. I’m pretty sure that if you (yes, you!) have an hour to spare, you can indeed get a barebones site up and running at Neocities.org, which is a big advantage over having nothing. And if you have a few more hours, you can learn how to further improve and customize it and maybe add a newsletter — or maybe even that blog.

But then to make it all work, you have to actually use and share that site and newsletter link. A few quick pointers for keeping it alive.

1. Add your website link to your social media biographies. This is key, and I’m kind of shocked by how often folks don’t do this. Our social media accounts will disappear in the fullness of time; these sites aren’t permanent. So stick your domain name in your bio so people can find you there and subscribe to your newsletter. Having your website in your bio also lets you make a great first impression — say you’re an artist and an editor is thinking about hiring you. If they find your social media site, they can click on your website link and immediately see your awesome art. Do it, friends!
2. Make a “Cool Links” page on your website and share the sites of friends and colleagues. This is how we did it back in the day — we found out about other cool sites from the links pages of cool sites we visited. Let’s bring that vibe back. Here’s my cool links page, if you need any inspiration.
3. Post updates from your site and links to your newsletter on your social media accounts. Now is not the time to be shy. Your social media followers followed you because they’re interested in what you do. Share it with them! Multiple times a day, even! Different people sign into social media at different times; if you post about a new project in the morning, repost that thing in the midday and evening so everyone has a chance to see it.
4. Consider collecting emails at live events. Back in the early 2000s, I passed around a pad and pen and collected email addresses for my mailing list after every film screening. These days, subscribers have to confirmed, so you can’t just add those emails directly to your email list and start sending them newsletters. But you can email them once after the event with the signup link to your newsletter. I’m thinking about starting this up again. Whatever it takes!
5. Web rings? OMG web rings! Back in the 1990s, before the dominance of social media and search engines, we had glorious web rings that connected like-minded or similarly themed webpages through a chain of links. And guess what? They’re kind of back? I found some awesome, simple webring code provided by garlic.garden and built a Web Ring for Dorks (Complimentary) for retro sites like gregpak.nexus. Could this take off for more modern sites? II don’t know, but I’m hoping to find out!

It’s okay to kind of suck at this

As much as I’m trying to make this all seem simple, it’s a lot, isn’t it? Most of us just want to make our comics or write our books or whatever; we don’t want to be web designers and webmasters and publicity coordinators. Unfortunately, no one else is gonna do it for us — unless you’re wildly wealthy and can hire a team, which I assume isn’t you if you’re reading this. So it’s up to us.

But I think it’s important to recognize that doing any of this is vastly better than doing none of it. And having a barebones but functional website is better than having no way for folks to find out about you or your work. So if all you have the spoons for is cobbling together the most basic page, so be it! You’ve done that much, and that’s great!

If you’re lucky, you might also discover that you enjoy this kind of work. Preeti has written about the joy of working on her 1990s retro site. As she writes in her HTML handcoded blog, “making things is fun.” Figuring out all of this and putting together fun sites and linking into a community of fellow creatives who are making their own sites can be incredibly satisfying and good for the mind and soul.

Best wishes and please do let me know on Bluesky if this has been helpful — or if you’ve made your own site!