Getting stuck in. The birth of a website

Chris Shiflett convinced me that building a website might be a fun quick project. (Also, Christian Buckson constantly reminds me through his steady stream of posts that i should get better at sharing.)

Armed with no web development skills, little time, years of muddling-through and the enthusiasm of a complete amateur, this is how I approached this.

Total effort from 0 to launch: 3.5 hours

Total invested: £53.76 (£2.50 domain name for 1 year from Namecheap.com, £51.26 hosting for 4 years on the cheapest plan with Hostinger.co.uk)

Choosing the right URL – just like picking the name of your first-born, it’s easy for only for some (est. 1h)

• Wanted something simple and resilient, to be able to throw at it whatever content I decide on (I genuinely refrained myself from planning, to avoid overthinking myself out of this)
• Very quickly realised the answer was to use my name – also very quickly realised I’m blessed with a very common one
• Decided on either Radu (the name I never use!) or Marin (surname), depending on availability

Picking the build – the green hills between mountains and deserts (est. 1h)

• 3x approaches considered, with different degrees of effort requirements (I considered initial effort but I weighted ongoing maintenance more)
• Code it from scratch – free but difficult, flexible, great learning experience. Dismissed this because it’d make updating/ maintaining the website a chore and that might kill the project prematurely.
• Use a website builder – expensive but easy, more limited in options, less learning opportunities. Dismissed this because I don’t want to regret the spend if this project fails (especially after my poor Ted Baker share purchases).
• Use a CMS – the right option for me as it’s free, as difficult as I want to make it, and allows easy updates once set properly (quick, small wins which will encourage me to work on this more). I looked into Drupal, Joomla and WP – a custom deployment of WP is what I’m going for. Here’s a detailed comparison.

The right infrastructure (est 1h)

• Here, I relied on Reddit a lot – my main criteria across both domain and hosting: cheap, easy to use, Reddit following to flag any technical functionality I should be paying attention to when making my choices. This was my way of shortcutting hours of research on infrastructure and endless acronyms.
• Thanks to reddit, I also added “low scam risk” to my criteria, because I discovered that “free” hosting could come packaged with malware, so I steered cleared from that.
• Decided to go for Namecheap.com and Hostinger.co.uk – on reddit, they even have another discount code, which I happily used for a few more £s off my order.
• Here’s where things get far less easy – probably because the reddit resources are more scarce.
• I chose this. I freak out a little when I saw this would authorise them to charge my account whenever they want – I take comfort in the fact that I can revoke the authorisation. I used this dude’s tutorial and it went well.

Stitching everything together – and admiring the small win (est 0.5h)

• Removed the pre-authorisation from my PayPal account for Hostinger.co.uk to renew the hosting automatically. I like control over these things.
• Installed the vanilla WP from the Hostinger control panel
• Mapped my hosting to my Namecheap domain
• Waited for what it seemed like hours, refreshing marin.live every 20 seconds, until finally…
• Success!! It worked, I could access it.

I’m so pumped and full of energy – keen to get my teeth into the design, and potentially look into Cloudflare for security. That’ll have to wait, as it’s getting close to 8AM, and I need to prep for the full workday ahead.

Key learnings:

1. When the downside is low but the upside is high/ unlimited, “getting stuck in” is probably the right strategy (even though you expect high complexity and uncertainty)
2. Once stuck in, the problem will likely drive you, not the other way around – thus you don’t need to worry about focus and motivation anymore, the universe pulls you in.
3. For me, it felt far more natural to tinker/ muddle through than to expose my child-like play – it’s a muscle I’ll need to exercise more in the future.

Regarding that last point, what would you advise a beginner like me to figure out next?

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What do you think? Any ideas on how to improve my text above? Any insights or ideas you got from it? Connect with me via email, or just drop me a line on Reddit or Linkedin – you will make my day!

Nota bene. I’m not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this article. All views are my own, obviously.