Wordpress Personal Website
MY FIRST WORDPRESS WEBSITE Welcome First, welcome, friends! This is my first post. Fittingly, it is about my first WordPress website. A lot of firsts in this article–if you could not already tell. Now let us move on from the first section.
Inspiration Why build your own website? A question I have asked myself a-many times in recent years. To make a long story, short: a website is a great medium to display your depth as a person, an employee, and it acts as a natural keeper of history.
Research As a software engineer, I am privy to the plethora of ways to build a website. In fact, I have designed, developed, and enhanced more websites than I can recall–due to my education, personal projects, internship, and jobs throughout my career.
My initial thought was to build my website as a typical software engineer would: with an opensource framework, custom HTML, CSS, JS, and it being a project in its own merit; however, that is not the case. I determined a visual drag-and-drop website builder–like WordPress–was the best choice.
Visual drag-and-drop website builders offer the opportunity to focus on different aspects of website development from that of the typical software engineer route. Emphasis on user design rather than feature functionality, content creation via a visual builder instead of a templating engine, and project scope are prime examples. Furthermore, I failed to see a significant amount of personal growth resulting from building my own website–due to its theoretical construction being similar to previous projects, with little room for experimentation (a blog can only be so fancy). To further emphasis the points of focus, I restricted myself to no coding, only free themes, plugins, and widgets, and minimal CSS.
With the structure determined, I settled with BlueHost + WordPress integration. BlueHost offers the best deal amongst web hosts and WordPress is free, the most popular content management system, and has an ambitious, active community.
Implementation BlueHost makes registering your domain name, setting up your server, and starting your first website a breeze. I simply had to follow along with the sign up procedure–and within a few hours, everything was in order: my very own generic website. This is great!
Default WordPress Dashboard Now the true challenge would present itself: the design side of things. Anybody who knows me knows I fancy a strong preference for objectivity over subjectivity. This does not mean I invalidate subjectivity; rather, I am comfortable when I am able to compare myself or my content against a concrete criteria. Recently, I have grown aware of such and wish to reduce this dependency to better be able to function in dynamic, real world situations.
After 20+ hours of researching WordPress forums, YouTube tutorials, and conversations with friends–I found Hestia by Themeisle to match my style. On a side note, the software at my previous employer followed the Material UI philosophy–which Hestia follows as well. In layman terms, the Material UI philosophy can be described as minimalistic, mobile-friendly, and a perfect match for me.
Example Material UI With a theme chosen, an understanding of my website’s intent, and a bit of antsiness to finally start creating content–I entered experimentation mode. Researching plugins and widgets, testing their capabilities, and evaluating my needs against the available options was the name of the game. At this point, I constantly had to remind myself to set limits, in the name of project scope. Thankfully during the theme research process, I hand drew some mockups for the overall structure and vibe to act as a guide in the overwhelming ocean of design. This little bit of preparation significantly reduced my workload; preparation is key! Now I have a polished, public-facing website ready for content.
Perpetuation As technology is not a static entity but rather a living thing–my website will never be officially complete. There will always be upgrades, design alterations, new plugins and widgets, and much more. As is the nature of the Internet.
With that understanding, I plan to maintain and continuously improve my website for eternity. Yes, eternity. Because my consciousness will be transported to a digital host before my physical passing–and will eventually transcend into pure energy, like the plotline to Space Odyssey.
This, of course, is a hyperbole! Nevertheless, I plan to maintain and continuously improve my website–as long its original purpose holds true: to display my depth as a person, an employee, and act as a natural keeper of history.
Afterthought Building your own website can be a daunting task. Especially if you are susceptible to project creep, like I am. The many preparations I took no doubt kept this task within a reasonable range of time and effort. Preparation is key!
Electing to use a visual drag-and-drop builder was the right choice for me. Now, the overhead to content creation is lessened–encouraging me to contribute more often.
The amount of knowledge I have gained from my different approach is much more than I initially expected. This is great! Now I am better able to perceive designs and deduct their purpose and conscious and subconscious influences. This realization taught me design is more objective than I originally believed it to be.
I am happy overall with my first personal website!
External References Themeisle Hestia theme guides https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpom4SSyo-8 https://docs.themeisle.com/article/656-how-to-create-a-child-theme-for-hestia https://docs.themeisle.com/article/1070-add-yoast-breadcrumbs-in-hestia Google Materials UI library documentation https://material.io/ https://material.io/design/color/dark-theme.html https://material.io/design/color/the-color-system.html Miscellaneous https://jamesglen.org.uk/2017/06/hestia-pro-css-snippets/ https://blog.prototypr.io/how-to-design-a-dark-theme-for-your-android-app-3daeb264637 Categories: PROJECTS Tags: Quarantine Related Posts