As we have been seeing in class, some students have previously created a website in order to host their portfolio, which is one of the requirements for this unit’s assignment. Creating my own website is an exciting project that I always wanted to develop, and in this post I will explain a bit about the experience.
There is a huge amount of services available and ways to create a website, the majority of them offer an online site builder with pre-made templates and paid and free plans, some of the most popular of these companies are Wix, Cargo, WordPress, etc… After checking around these builders and starting to build one with Dorik, I found the limitations of these free plans, they offer a very limited number of pages and storage and shortly want to charge for custom domains and paid plans.
I always wanted to build a website from scratch and I finally went opted to build my site at Github Pages, with your profile on Github, you can create a repository and use it at a server that will host your website, using the address username.github.io. This process is completely free, with unlimited storage and number of pages which is much more suitable if you want to keep updating your site in the future. I also needed an offline builder, for which I used Publii, which combines a bit of menu based option with HTML coding. You can still download templates online for these kind of builders and although they might not be as amazing as paid software like Wix, they are quite good and you are able to modify the code as you like, and from my experience offline building is much stable and faster than online programs which use big amounts of memory.
Publii is linked with my Github repository, where it saves the code, pictures, videos etc… when your site is ready to be synced with the server, we just need to save changes and link with our address. I have been also able to embed YouTube videos and Spotify music for example, just by sharing the content and selecting “embedded” we will be able to copy the HTML code and paste in Publii. Finally, I needed to link my server with a domain; domains are normally a paid service, although there are some ways to get free domains eventually. In this case I’ve been lucky to achieve a .me domain free for one year thanks to the Github’s Education program, which is available for UAL students. Now I just needed to link the domain in my editor and at Github and my website is ready to visit, please feel free to have look:
I hope you enjoy it!