Sami MäättäSetting up Your Own Website (with Wordpress)
9.8.2022 update: This is a post from my old site, which was built with Wordpress. It doesn't reflect the creation of this site with Eleventy and Netlify, but I decided to leave it as a record!
As I had gotten my own website up and was wondering "What to post?" I figured it would make sense to post my journey to actually realize the website. So here goes.
Basic Building Blocks of a Website
For me, it makes most sense to divide the creation (and maintenance) of a website into three parts:
- A domain - quenched.fi
- A hosting service - domainhotelli.fi
- A website editor - Wordpress
'Building a house' is an apt analogy for the parts of a website. A domain is like your address to your house. Hosting is like renting a piece of a property for your house. The website editor is like architect or the construction company to build your house.
Things I Spent Money on
First things first: Things that are costing me money are the domain and the hosting. The domain costs me around 9 €/year and the hosting about 35 €/year for the first year. The hosting is about half off for the first year. Regular prices seemt to be around 80 €/year. I guess this is how they trap you, since migrating your stuff to another hosting service is a hassle (update: which I am finding out now...). I have to look into that some time in the future!
The Domain
This will be the name of your website, if you are willing to pay premium for hosting. Usually free hosting doesn't let you use your own domain if you have one. This is why you see website names like "nönnönöö.wordpress.org" or "nannannanaa.medium.com". They didn't want to pay for hosting, or they simply didn't get a domain for themselves. (I actually think the main reason for getting a domain is that you can't come up with a good name. It's hard!) Those kinds of websites do make it easier to try out whatever kind of content you want to do, so the risks are minimal.
The Hosting
It seems like I effectively rented the domain for a year from Domainhotelli. It's a Finnish provider since I wanted the ".fi" ending. I looked through other hosting options, but settled back to Domainhotelli, since it seemed to be quite cheap and solid for the price.
The Website Editor
Once you have your hosting set up, you have to decide in what way you want to manage your website. Mainly how it looks to the audience and how you interact with it yourself.
Sure you can just start writing HTML and then upload it to the hosting platform (I don't actually know how. Let's see in the future.), but you make it easier for yourself to simply choose a hosting service, which allows easy installation of a website editor. There are many choices (to my understanding) and I only chose Wordpress. The biggest reason being that I wanted to display mathematics on my website and noticed that the publication for Finnish math education Dimensio was using Wordpress. They are displaying maths, so it must work, right? I am actually still working on that, but it looks promising.
A Lot to Learn
There is still a lot to learn about useing Wordpress: from its UI to its many plugins - and also just plainly how to deliver information in an entertaining way. Luckily all of this is practice, so I get a nice head start to it!
I also want to focus on making my website as accessible as possible for any assistive technologies, so let me know if there are any problems with them.
Shoot me a message, if you need some help with setting up your own website. In the end, we are here to help others.