Why I started a website

Why a website?

So why did I start a website? For a start, I want to show my work on a more detailed level for anyone who’s interested in the deeper behind-the-scenes of the videos I make. Every video begins with an idea of the title, thumbnail, and learning from every upload. I capture my ideas and random thoughts on my private notion page, but I want to crystallise them in a blog post that’s approachable and easy for anyone to understand.

These things aren’t what I would put on my channel because I want to optimise my videos for the viewers’ experience, rather than rambling on some random thought of the week or how and why I thought of doing this video. So this website is where I practise my writing, I try to be concise in my blog posts, and it’s pretty much also me practising writing and expressing myself freely and easily.

You know, website costs money. Like there’s hosting, which is paying for web servers to run the website. And you got to buy a domain also so it appears nicely with a .com or a .sg because I’m happy to identify as a Singaporean brand. All these things cost money like a few hundred bucks for 3-4 years. But I see it as an investment. Reinvesting the money I made from my online earnings to do more content online.

Posting frequency

I used to drag my feet on starting my own LinkedIn page when I was still an undergraduate. I know it would lead to jobs, but I don’t know what to put on my page, I don’t have fancy details to plug in there, but I just started it anyway with the little that I had. Later, I learnt the principle of building things up, one bit at a time. I see it this way also with this website. I don’t post videos as regularly as other creators. Maybe 1 video after every 1-2 months. But in between videos, I foresee posting a random learnings once a week, judging from my Notion journal that goes back to 2021. I hope writing these posts here helps me to practise more in public. Hopefully it would lead to more deals and collaboration. I like to get to know someone more personally by reading their works anonymously first to get a sense of whether we’re a good fit.

What to expect

So just like any creative project, I believe my website would evolve as we go along. But for now, I see a few areas that I want to post regularly on.

One is life lessons. These come from observations about people and how things work. Usually it’s a personal lesson that I want to write down so that I could get it off my head, helps me clarify my thoughts so it reads out nicely, and also remember it next time because chances are, I won’t remember everything and my memory isn’t that good. Sometimes when I read back what I wrote, I was like, wow I really wrote that? Sometimes, it’s cringe. Yeah I had that bad encounter. But most of the time I want to see growth.

Second is detailed behind the scenes of how I made my videos. Behind every title and thumbnail are inspirations I see from other people’s content. I like to talk about it after the video’s published to reflect on how I did. Most of the time I’m proud of what I decided on because it was the best that I could do back then. I also want to elaborate on the more detailed findings that I otherwise wouldn’t add into the video because it might be too boring.

The less frequent posts I would make are annual strategy post, where I reflect on my past videos and what I thought of them, and what I want to do in future. This helps me to keep my content up-to-date with my what I have in mind and it’s always good to reflect on how we do once in a while.

I also took some photos “semi-professionally” too because I was asked or invited nicely to take some photos for company events. I once landed a paid gig to do so. But otherwise, all photos shown are handpicked to capture the energy of the event. I don’t really want to do photography gigs though, but since this is more like a personal portfolio website, why not just show them instead of storing them in a hard drive. Some of my videos were also nominated for awards but again those celebratory posts wouldn’t be so often.

Lastly, I would want to shape up on what kind of service do I exactly want to provide professionally. Maybe it’s setting up a home dining since someone requested that and I like to serve people my food. Or even a food stall or restaurant, that would be a dream. Or something more basic like offering talks at fun events, or consultation for people who want my views, or brand collaborations to make videos together. Anyway I hope this leads to more fun, so here we go.