In this post, I will share with you my decent knowledge of how to create a fun and simple website, and how I created mine.

First Steps

There are many steps to creating a website. First, you need a domain name. Then, you need a host for the domain. Lastly, you need a website builder to add content. I started by purchasing a domain. This was done through GoDaddy, which is fairly cost-effective. I purchased “kionknows.com” for around 13 dollars. So now I had simply a domain name, but nothing on it. This is when I needed to add a website host and content-building program. The site I chose was wordpress.org because of its free template and flexibility options.

Security & Data

There are many different sites that offer to help build your website. Some are free, others are not. When you look at them, they all look very similar (except for the prices). But underneath all of that, there are big differences. These differences involve how different sites handle your data. Free sites, like Wix and WordPress.com(note that I used WordPress.org), sell your data and make their money that way. Sites in which you need to pay, including WordPress.org, do not sell your data. They make their money directly from you, in exchange for letting you keep your data where you like it. The issue with sites that sell your data is that this makes you and your online presence more vulnerable to hacking, and whoever can access your site’s data can also see who has visited it, and what they looked at.

Anyways, I now needed a host for my website. So I asked my mom if I could piggyback on her hosting service, for which I got permission. But when we tried to add the domain to HostGator, there were problems. We then turned to customer support.

This was necessary, but not the fastest way of doing things, which I did not know at the time. After filling out the form to transfer my domain, I got the curse of death: “Thank you for using HostGator. Your domain transfer will take 7-10 business days.” You know, I hate business days. This was no exception. I also could not edit the site while the transfer was taking place. Long story short, things online are not easy, and I had a few late nights trying to finish this website. In the end, though, I had enough time.

Formatting the Template

Let’s take a look at what I’ve done so far. I’ve purchased a domain and installed wordpress.org to ensure the safety of my online presence. Great! We have a site, it’s secure, and it works on a professional program. But one key thing is still missing: content! Now, please take a moment to disregard the fact that this content exists. Okay. Now I can confidently add my content without being abused in the comments.

Anyways, it’s content time! There are many aspects to this. First, I decided to start with the basics and installed a theme on my website. This makes it so much easier, all I have to do is change colors and add text. Which I proceeded to do. For now, the color refuses to change, which I have no choice but to live with. (I’m good at this, I promise!) Otherwise, this process went smoothly.

Since there isn’t much to talk about for adding text, I’ll go a little bit deeper on this. You can change just about everything on your site, especially if you’re using Gutenberg, a highly advanced site editor. That doesn’t really matter for me at the moment, though. Since I need this for a school assignment, I am limited on time, so I didn’t use Gutenberg hardly at all. Ok, back to text editing. There are options for different types of media to insert, and where and the size of said media (shown below).

For example, to insert that image above I clicked the hamburger sign at the bottom right and it led me to image uploading. Easy peasy. And for this and all text, I just clicked “heading”, wrote the heading, and hit enter to add the text below. Most of this is quite simple indeed.

Conclusion

So, this has definitely been an interesting journey. I encountered problems I had not seen coming, and was surprised at how easy some parts were. All in all, I had fun. Given more time, I would have done more customization, and will do so in the future. The real challenge is at the beginning when you need to purchase a domain, make it secure, and find a good website building program. After that, it’s fairly intuitive, as most decent building programs will teach you as you go along. I am not truly satisfied with my end product, at least for this post, but I attribute that to my habit of overachieving. Anyways, I enjoyed it, and I hope you have enjoyed my amazing website that tells you how to build a website.

Until my next post!