With powerful web publishing platforms like Wix available today, more and more people take their online presence to their own hands and create websites that promote their company or services. But doing business is not the only reason to learn how make a website. If you are passionate about a hobby or your extracurricular activities, why not set up a site that is dedicated only to that?
Now more than ever, building a website is an accessible and fun task. If you invest time and effort in a hobby, you can easily share your passion and your achievements online. Creating this type of a website will enable you to expose your abilities to a broader community and interact with people who have similar interests. It's easy, for example, to turn a love of traveling into a great travel and tourism website or even a fan website.
The Wix Team prepared a short list of ideas that can help you get started with a beautiful hobby website.
Tell Your Story
Websites that are dedicated to hobbies and interests are by nature more personal than business websites. Don’t be embarrassed to tell your site visitors how you discovered your passion, why it keeps sucking you in and what do you do about it. Your individual perspective is a big part of how your hobby interacts with your life, and therefore it is interesting even to strangers.
Show Your Work
Your website creates a space for you to present your own achievements, so be sure to share samples of your work. If your hobby involves visual arts like photography, illustrations or digital designs, create a gallery and upload your images as files. A gallery can also work well with more day-to-day related activities, like gardening, cooking, interior design or sports. If your hobby is more text-based like poetry or analysis of current events, you can add a blog to your website and easily update it with new materials.
Share Tips
As a person who invests a fair amount of time in their hobby, you must have creative ideas that can inspire other people with similar interests. Use one of the pages on your website to share these personal tips and to show others how you tackled challenges and problems that are unique to your hobby.
For instance, amateur photographers can explain how to construct DIY lighting accessories; experienced joggers can tell site visitors about their routine and their nutrition plans; passionate vegans can share recipes that make dairy-free life much easier. To come up with helpful ideas for your website, think about questions that interest you when searching for websites that are related to your hobby.
You could also consider doing this through a forum on your site, where your community could come together to share and be inspired. Check out these best forum software options.
Be Informative
Almost every hobby has an entire community built around it, with events, news and reviews that fellow enthusiasts follow closely. To make your website more interesting to people in your community, be sure to share valuable information that comes your way.
Good examples for such news bits are new releases of gear and accessories – as well as your evaluation of them, meetups and workshops that relate to your interests, videos and articles that present an interesting approach, public debates surrounding your topic, and more. In trying to decide what is newsworthy information for your website, consider whether this is something that you will bring up in a face-to-face conversation with other enthusiasts.
Get Feedback
One of the main purposes of creating a website for your hobby is to get in touch with other people that share your passion. Give site visitors the opportunity to contact you by adding links to social media profiles and by adding a contact form that is connected to your email address. Show your visitors that you are happy to start a conversation with them. This is one of the most rewarding aspects of getting an online presence.
