How I built this website

I’ve had this domain for over a year now, and this site has gone through a few iterations since then. For the most part, it served and still serves (at the time of writing) as a place to host random project files for myself and Cornerstone. The separation to Cornerstone means I can’t mess up anything actually important. There are plenty other ways I could host project files of course, but how boring would that be!

What I wanted

I wanted this site to be:

Cheap
Easy to build
Functional

The costs

There used to be two costs to this website, the first being the domain name and the second the hosting. Since finding out that I could host my site for free on Netlify, my only cost is now the domain name (which is practically nothing!).

Building it

Rather than paying for something like wordpress or squarespace, I decided to build this site myself. As well as saving myself another monthly bill, I also get to make my site exactly how I want it.

I’m no developer, but my interest in tech has allowed me to learn the basics - enough to throw something together. Using Bootstrap made this project significantly easier. It took about a day.

Functionality

This website was largely inspired by James Clear’s website, and a random template that I found on colorlib called Stories. The final design is a merge of the two. I hope it’s clean, simple and easy to use.

What's next

At the time of writing this, the site is just a few .html files linked together. As I write more articles (and learn more code, specifically Laravel/PHP), I plan to turn this into a “real” website with efficient code and a backend database. I’ll add more features as I go. I like the idea of a member newsletter, so I’ll need to figure that out.

I’m pretty happy with my little site.

If you want to build your own website from scratch, I recommend starting with an online HTML and CSS course. There's loads of free info out there, so there's no need to spend any cash.

If you'd rather user a templated service instead, then I think Wix, Squarespace or Wordpress are all good options.

Good luck!