What Has Your Personal Website Done for You Lately?

…studies are not needed to confirm that for the vast majority of people, personal websites are a colossal waste of time.

I’m not talking about freelancers or plumbers or other individual service providers. Obviously, in those cases, you are your business and you need a site to advertise what you do. But if you’re a salaried, full-time staffer in, say, pharmaceutical sales, what exactly are you going to show on your site? The pills you carried around in your roller bag?

Having your own website is as outdated as it is unnecessary. At one time, maintaining samgrobart.com was a way to show that I was Internet-savvy, and the novelty of a site overshadowed its uselessness. Now, though, we’re all reasonably fluent in how to use the Web. If I want to find out about you, I’ll do some reconnaissance on Facebook (FB). I’ll check your Twitter feed, your Instagram account, and your Tumblr page. Most of us already exist all over the Internet, whether we like it or not. “You have two résumés today,” says Sarah Downey, an analyst at online-privacy company Abine. “There’s the one you carefully write and put on a personal website, and there’s the sum of all your online activity, which you have no control over.”

There have been several times throughout my career where I considered creating a personal website for myself, but it never happened (and now that this website exists, I don’t really need one anymore). Also, mike dang dot com has already been taken by a developer with my name who lives in Texas, and I’m sure he’s getting a lot more out of it than I would (there is also a prominent surgeon who lives in Hawaii with my name, and perhaps he’d like the url too). Tell me: Do you have a personal website? Has it been helpful to have it?

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