Start creating a website
Many people have thought about it but only a few actually do it. Creating your own website can be a simple or complicated task depending on your prior knowledge. In general it is a fairly basic concept but one that has developed over the last 20 years.
When starting a website one needs to think about what it is you want to share with the wider audience of the internet. After this you need to a select a domain name that has not been used yet and this can be a daunting task if going for the .com version. The next step would be to decide where you are going to host this website and assuming that most people do not have a fully operational server or datacenter most people will have to select a web hosting company. There is usually a small fee involved for the domain name and a slightly bigger fee for the hosting. Once this is arranged then the next task will be to create the design and the content for your website and here the most challenges lay.
I created my first website with just notepad and limited knowledge of HTML. This will still get you a website but not one that anybody nowadays will want look at. In order to make it look a bit more attractive you need to have some knowledge of cascading style sheets or CSS. This can still be done with just notepad but it is getting a bit more difficult. Creating horizontal menus with full hover effects (when you go over the menu certain effects appear) can be challenging and time consuming. But it is still doable and it does make you feel like a bit of a programmer. It does not give a very quick result and making it look modern and fresh is certainly not for everybody. Also the speed of creating more content is limited. If you want to go to the next step in development you can add PhP to your skills and now you can have a more modern layout and content management. You can add a database in case you want to start logging data from your website visitors or even get more advanced by creating online functionality. In all fairness at the PhP point a lot of people will feel it is getting quite technical and this is maybe the point to consider something else.
This something else is WordPress. This is still based on HTML, CSS and PhP but not that you actually notice this. The online software is quite intuitive and as such quite approachable for many different people. In fact while writing this blog I can say I had little knowledge about WordPress and in the meantime 5 days later I have created the website you are looking at. A great source for learning WordPress is youtube (as with anything) nowadays. I will add some links to videos I found particularly useful. Good to realise that WordPress on its own is for free. There are commercial options available for different plug ins or templates but you get quite far with not spending anything on top of your domain and hosting.
One challenge may always be is to keep your website up to date and even when using WordPress there is a certain trap that your site will look like all the other ones. This is a strong point as people will know how to navigate your site but can be a negative as well as you most likely will not be unique. Of course it depends on the reason for creating a website, is it for a hobby you might not be bothered with getting a unique experience, but when your website is the beginning a new career you may be more serious about being fully unique to get as much valuable traffic (visitors) as possible. I will spend some time also on the commercial side of things as I am learning myself but for the moment my website is a hobby and as with all hobbies, it is costing more than it delivers.
