Building a Website!

I really liked learning about the process of making my own website. I didn’t know about web development, html, git, and stuff like this. But I’m curious and I can show you what I did and hope this stimulates someone else to try something new by themselves.

This isn’t a tutorial, just wanted to share my journey into web development.

Why doing this

I started some months ago just before my exam session this last semester. I needed a project to push my curiosity.

I desired a different experience of learning, different in regards to what I was doing at Uni. I wanted to start with my idea, make a plan, research the right tools for the job, and solve the problems as they occurred. Simply the engineering way of doing things. Something I should know and I think I am quite good at doing it.

Another skill I wanted to dig into is storytelling, at which I was really good in school, but where I feel like I have lost the touch. I want to win it back because it’s a valuable skill in life and I want to do all of this in English.

One last pleasant thing is just the fact that I am putting something of mine out there. I enjoyed the idea of having in this form a collection of things that I like and that characterize me.

Let’s start.

The Tools

The first thing you need in every project is a selection of the right tools. The following are my choices.

Jekyll

I built this site with Jekyll. It’s an awesome tool written in the language Ruby that helps you create static websites. There is a huge community ready to help and tons of explanations online. On top of Jekyll, you can dress up your site with themes.

Minimal Mistakes

I did a little research on Jekyll’s theme community and found Minimal Mistakes. It’s quite popular and looks good. There are a lot of choices and as long as you pick something not too exotic you will not have any problem finding solutions to issues you will have because trust me, you will have some.

GitHub Pages

For hosting my website I used GitHub Pages. It works well with Jekyll and it’s everything an amateur like me needs. You will also get a free domain for your project, it will be USERNAME.github.io, where USERNAME stands for your GitHub name. You can make it fancy, like I did, by buying a brand-new domain.

Google Domains

For my name on the web, I choose Google Domains. There are a lot of other tools out there, so make your research. You want to have a clear, short, and understandable name. Google makes it easy if you are willing to pay a dozen euro per year.

Favicon and Logo

If you want to make it really fancy, you should take a look at a logo and a favicon. You can design a logo real simple by using something like Canva and generate a favicon by using something like realfavicongenerator.net. After that, you need some lines of code… et voilà!

Conclusion

There you go! That was my process. I feel like I will learn new things and update this often.

I enjoyed the process and got some good flow while designing my page. Simply the best feeling. I am satisfied with what I created and I am looking forward to exploring this even more. Now I only need to start writing!

That’s a wrap!

Ciao!

Update

You can see my source code for this website at this GitHub link.