Margarita

Hey Mridu How cool to find a person who does the same thing at the same time as me! I've recently launched my blog too - https://romenkova.com/ and I've gone the same questions as you did. So maybe it would be interesting for you to have my answers.

1. What platform to choose Jekyll, Pelican, Hugo, Ghost, etc. I personally decided to make it as simple as possible and just do it with familiar tools. I'm a Front End dev, so I've chosen Gatsby because I know React. Cool thing, everything works out of the box - just install and you're ready to go.
2. Domain, do I need a custom domain? Or netlify, Heroku domain would do. The custom domain looks more professional, but if the content is interesting - who cares? By the way, I wound out that sometimes it is useful to google for promo codes. In the first place, my domain cost was around 8$, I googled "promo code " and eventually it became 1$ after using it.
3. Do I actually need a personal website or I should write on already available platforms like dev.to, medium, etc? After reading the newsletter from Monica Lent (bloggingfordevs.com, inspiring and extremely useful stuff), I decided to go with the personal website. I just wanted my own part of the internet: customizable, independent. But I see one an obvious problem - no one sees my article (I guess it's also because I've just started and have only one). I had a testing article on Medium about Next.js and it had some amount of views, but in the case of a personal website - it's zero views.
4. Theme for the website? I've made my own because I like to design interfaces.

I have some feedback Looks great! It's so amazing and impressive that you have lots of talks at conferences! The Facebook link at the header leads to the Ghost page, which must be a bug. The email link at the contacts page goes to 404. You could make it "mailto:[email protected]" and it will open email client when clicking. Same with blog link from the contacts page - 404.

Good luck with your blog! Let's grow together.