Hashnode enables developers to create a blog mapped to their custom domain for free. So developers will only focus on publishing articles on their Hashnode powered blogs while Hashnode takes care of the rest - customization, readership, visibility, web monetization, and so much more.
Most developers wonder why they should create a blog with Hashnode instead of building one from scratch. So, this article aims to question the reasoning of these developers and at the same time highlight why using Hashnode is a great option.
First, I have 3 questions for you ๐
For every developer looking to create a blog from scratch, here are three questions I have for you:
Do you complete every side project you work on?
I honestly can't keep track of the number of side projects I have not completed over the years. And interestingly, this seems to be the case with other developers across the world.
If your case is different, then I'd love to know your secret. But if you are like most of us with uncompleted side projects, do you think building a blog would be different?
Let's assume you decide to build a blog from scratch, what happens when you can't finish it due to lack of time? You won't be able to publish an article on an unfinished blog. So, there goes the beginning of your dev blogging journey down the drain. ๐ญ
Would you have time to maintain the blog?
Assuming you complete building the blog, what happens when you can't maintain the blog after some months/year because of your busy schedule or for some other reasons beyond your control? You may be forced to stop publishing articles till you update the blog or at the worst case, stop publishing articles forever.
Time is a scarce resource and it may be advisable to spend your time on activities that have the highest investment. Maintaining a blog when Hashnode already does that for you at no cost, may not be the best investment of your time.
How would people discover the articles you publish on your blog?
When you create a blog from scratch, it doesn't come with an inbuilt community like Hashnode. So if you don't have a strong social media presence, your article might not be read by people for a couple of weeks, months or even years.
But with Hashnode, there are different developers across the world early waiting to read your insightful articles from day 1. So, there's no cold start for you.
So, what exactly am I saying?
Creating a blog with Hashnode saves you the stress of creating your blog yourself and helps you to be more efficient. It gives you the best of both worlds - a blog mapped to your domain for free and readership from the dev community.
The good thing is, you can create a blog on Hashnode in under 2 minutes and start writing articles immediately. You can also republish your existing articles on Hashnode for more visibility if you are not ready to move to Hashnode entirely yet.
Guess what? I am not the only developer who loves using Hashnode. Here's what other developers worldwide think about Hashnode.
Conclusion
This article is very opinionated and may not necessarily apply to developers that build blogs because they want to learn about the languages or framework used during the building process.
So, if that's you, go ahead and build that blog from scratch. After all, you will not have to maintain it or publish articles there. And if you do, your intention may just be to test out what you've built.
But to developers like me who have full-time jobs, and other responsibilities but want to ship out articles to the developer community and get a lot of readerships - Hashnode is what you need to use. Learn more and create a blog on Hashnode.