Building Your Digital Home

Once people understand your project, and witness the passion and dedication with which you follow through, they’ll want to support you: eventually, some will ask about where to send their follower’s attention to.
This requires a clear, direct answer, which you might not be able to give though. The situation might be especially challenging when operating on a variety of social media channels: Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat, Reddit, Twitter and YouTube – you will have a different audience on each of these platforms, and if successful, there will be a lot of people following you there.

Why then to build a digital home? Because social media can’t ever be your home.
Although social media offers the benefits of free content hosting, as well as the promise of reaching the world’s attention because of their pre-existing user base, it is important to accept the very limited creative control you can ever have on it: you can essentially feed content, but nothing more.
Social media sites are known to change their mode of operation continuously, requiring you to constantly stay reactive and adapt. This is part of how to use social media, and isn’t necessarily a problem: Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram etc might have good points in frequently adapting their appearances and modes of operation.

For someone running a business, creative control is of utmost importance though: imagine a studio or working table where you set up your work to be seen, for you to work most efficiently – only to have it be placed differently when you return to work the next day. This frustration costs time and energy, and makes you reactive: you need to work in order to establish a state that was already established.

Anecdote

Zach and Tarn Adams of Bay 12 Games are the developers of the video game “Dwarf Fortress”. They have been working on it non-stop since 2002, sharing it online for free. Their main place of communication is their forum, which they host separately to their company website: As of autumn 2017, 50k members have written 4.2 million posts on 160k topics. While Dwarf Fortress can be found on almost any social media platform, Zach and Tarn can rely on their own hosted forums, as a place where they have full creative control.
This had a big impact when they eventually started to set up Patreon for receiving donations: to this day, they never posted any content there: because they knew that their supporters already had the best infrastructure set in place: the Bay 12 Games Forums.

Recap

Your project needs a stable home: a base that can only be changed by you, resulting in a fundament you can rely on – think of your website as a house where only you have the keys. This allows you to relax: no external content will be injected, no ads will appear – unless you want them to, and profit from them.

Goal

Your website can be your business card: you will feel comfortable about its looks and contents: although your internal creative processes might be messy, you can rely on a professional outward appearance that’s accessible, and suits your individual project’s agenda and style.

Your website can become more than a business card though: it can be an archive of your work, let people subscribe to your newsletter, offer links to your various social media experiences, contain the most accurate mission statement, and even include a forum, like Bay 12 Games does.

Think of your website as your home – a home that can grow rooms over time, yet also has outposts elsewhere: on social media. This allows you to benefit from the attention promised by social networks, while not having to stay reactive to these network’s changes. You stay in control.