So I’ve decided to build this website for a couple reasons. The obvious first reason is for it to serve as a portfolio once it’s done. However, if that was my only goal, I could probably achieve it much quicker and easier with drag and drop editors and prebuilt sites. What I really want is for the creation of this site to function as a learning exercise. Nothing is a better teacher than doing it and so that’s what I’ll do.
Today I took the time to research various hosting options and domain providers. For domain, Namecheap was true to its name and an easy choice. Choosing a host was a little more complicated, and there seemed to be a significant difference between the hosts recommended by websites versus those recommended by forums. I imagine this has a lot to do with affiliate marketing and other financial motivations for reviewers to recommend certain larger providers. I settled on Zume after negotiating for the developers tools to be enabled on the entry package. They are a smaller provider but well recommended, and my immediate experience with them was great. I decided against WordPress management because managing it myself will present another learning opportunity.
After changing Nameservers, setting up the SSL certificates, and installing WordPress, it was time to consider the website itself. I’m not entirely new to WordPress. I’ve previously used visual builders like Divi, HTML for formatting articles on a custom built website, and setup various plugins. In keeping with the theme of learning, I decided to eschew third-party builders and focus on the core WordPress experience. Whilst researching this, I was introduced to Full Site Editing (FSE). Released in 2021, FSE is intended to be the future core of WordPress functionality, making it the clear choice for how to build my site. Further to this, the recently released Twenty-Twenty-Four theme was built with this concept in mind. As the official theme, it should integrate well with all the features FSE aims to introduce, and so I’ve selected it with this in mind.
After a quick play with headers, writing this first post wraps up day one. Between the full time bootcamp and my job, finding time to work on this site will be difficult but the plan is to build it as my skillset grows so little and often should suit well.
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