Step-by-step process of creating a website, this website. What is used, how it’s used and what I have learnt.
Since I am a web-developer, it’s emberassing for me not to have a webpage, both personally and profesionally. If I am creating websites for a living I have to contribute to internet creation as well.
Professionally it’s my calling card, my notepad, scrapbook, my testing ground for new technologies as well as a place where I get and share my knowledge.
This one is my 2nd personal webpage that went live, first being an effect of my misguided youth (thank you archive.org), mind you I have learnt a lot creating the first one - mostly what not to do.
In the meantime (9 years…) I had made various attempts at modernizing, rewriting and rethinking my blog, around 30 that were scrapped due to being overcomplicated or underdeveloped or just impossible to create. That’s how I came to realize first all-important step in creating a website.
Q & A
Yup, this one is useful even for own projects, it’s obvious we do it for our clients - them being a bit loose with what they want (“I want a website” is a useless ), but even for ourselves it helps clarify the requirements.
Few questions I have asked myself to understand what I really want:
- What will I use the website for? commercial venture or personal website?
- Sharing a knowledge, personal, proving to myself I can make it work
- What kind of content would I like to publish
- articles and code snippets
- Do I need a place to store data? Do I need a backend application to process your data?
- no, I just want to write posts with minimum fuss, don’t need any backend to support it if I can get away with it
- Will I want to create a template myself or should I use some of the ready ones?
- I am web-developer, I can create any website. On other hand I am not a designer so it will be ugly one
- What are the most important things to me in this website?
- Ease of use, performance, simplicity, modern technologies
- What features would I like to have here?
- Search if I can make it work, AMP version, tagging, comments, some social sharing, maybe few ads
- What would I like to avoid?
- Any kind of security issues (accounts, bots), having to manage hosting a lot, complicated release and built process
Having answered all of those at least I could start formulating the requirements and choosing the best tools to make it happen.
That and more in the next parts.
