Day26 - Astro Series: Why am I writing?

@ Astro

A beautiful gradient background with a title: "Website Building Concepts"

Preface

Many times building a website focuses too much on how to handle technical issues, but there seems to be little concept of how to run your own site or product. So here I insert the history and lessons from my website-building process. (Mainly I’m a bit tired toward the end of writing and need to relax 😅)

You need both external and internal motivations to run a site

“Why do you want to run a website?” Think this through carefully before making it.

From when I first learned web development a few years ago until now, I’ve been preparing to write a blog. During that time I tried many different technologies and challenges, but I was never really satisfied with the results. Only recently did I gain a clearer understanding of what “writing a blog” actually is. Along the way I admired different people and learned important tips worth recording. To summarize, the motivations can be clarified into two types:

  • External motivation
  • Internal motivation

Keep these in mind; I will frequently mention how to generate these two types of motivation and how they will affect your website management throughout the article.

Building and running a website are different things

Before making this technical blog I had countless failed attempts. The biggest problem was that I didn’t understand what writing a blog meant for me. If it’s just “I’m a web engineer so I should have my own site” or “it looks cool on my resume,” that drive will be quickly forgotten. After learning some tool and producing a finished product, the desire to maintain it disappears. I’ve seen many such blogs; I myself made four or five half-finished ones, switching frameworks, changing styles… none were maintained in the end 😢. Before you fall into this trap, here are some points to watch so you don’t make the same mistakes.

Satisfy only one need—and the clearer the better

For example, “Web Dong” (https://www.webdong.dev/en/🔗) is a web technology blog whose external purpose is only one: to solve web technology related problems. Naive me once tried to combine a personal design portfolio, illustration portfolio, web portfolio, technical articles, and freelancing info all in one place (my terrible example here🔗). Oh my… Please don’t do that. It won’t make people think you’re versatile; it will only cause confusion and make them question your professionalism.

From the lesson above, the most basic need is to solve a clear problem that someone will pay for—that’s an effective and feasible external goal. The current goals for this site can be listed as:

  • Problem solved - Issues related to front-end web development techniques.
  • Audience - Beginner front-end engineers.
  • Competitive advantage - Lots of video and image explanations, combined with storytelling to make learning more approachable and fun.

Build a Minimum Viable Product

Now that you have a clear external purpose and audience, you can start building. But stop and think! To reach this goal quickly, what is the “minimum” set of features you need to complete so people will stop and pay attention to the solution you provide?

In my case, to “quickly and plainly solve people’s confusion about learning web development,” what does the minimum viable product look like? Is it having your own website? A professionally polished site appearance? Article search or comments? Good SEO support and fast page speed? None of those 😅. What you need first is to produce truly unique content that hits people’s pain points. Only after actually solving someone’s pain will further maintenance be useful.

So if you’re driven solely by external goals, carefully evaluate how to avoid wasting early energy on irrelevant details. Think about how to “get the product up quickly, immediately solve problems and get attention, then build features from feedback”—this is far more practical than making something that satisfies you but doesn’t meaningfully advance the product.

Developers especially tend to obsess over implementation details at the lower levels and often lose sight of the project’s purpose, easily falling into an endless development loop. At that point, evaluate whether you have enough time and energy to invest in the project. Remember that at the start you have the most energy and time; as time passes you will inevitably begin to feel tired. So the focus should be on quickly releasing a certain amount and quality of results.

Use existing services and tools to the fullest. Understanding your battlefield in advance is more effective than blindly investing time. For reference:

Internal motivation is necessary in addition to external goals

I explained how to attract and capture external factors and opportunities, but if you can’t convince yourself to keep going, you’ll still fail. In fact, I believe the influence of external factors is limited; encouragement and traffic fluctuations are fleeting. These external factors are visible yet intangible and hard to make a sustainable driving force. In reality, how many situations can be sustained long-term solely by others’ support?

For me, the most persuasive internal motivation for running my own site is similar to the concepts of Zettelkasten🔗 or Digital Garden🔗. Is writing only for external reasons? Of course not! Writing is not just output; it is also input. The thinking involved in this process cannot be replaced by AI, nor can any other person do it for me.

Be your own teacher: in the learning process you grow along with yourself.

During my vocational and higher education I learned that real-world problems continuously evolve. As a teaching assistant I continued to experience this. No one fully understands your learning status or knows solutions to all problems; you are your own teacher. You need confidence and calmness to handle and solve problems, and you are also a student—knowing that there is no finish line to learning new technologies. Only continuous learning and experimentation allow you to stand firm in a rapidly changing environment. So my internal motivation for blogging is simple: “Use writing to strengthen the brain’s input; it’s a way to organize and understand the world.”

Conclusion

By combining internal and external motivations—taking my own blog Web Dong🔗 as an example—I hope this helps you rethink the true goals and motivations for running your website. If you share the same ideas, you can start now—there’s no better time than the present.

Further Reading