Why and How I created a personal website

Hi, I am Gerardo. I’m a computer science engineer with 5+ years of experience dedicated to software development and I just created my personal website.

In the current times everything is on the internet. And I think it was just about time for me to put all my experience and knowledge there. Usually people opt for social media, but I didn’t want that. Social media is for the more informal stuff. I want to share more technical stuff and not scare my friends in the process.

To start things up, I will share why and how I did it.

Why?

General Knowledge

You may be thinking that having a website in 2021 is not a great challenge and even less if you are in the technology field. But I never had a website before and the only way you learn things is by doing. So while setting up my site I learn about the different types of hosting available and their prices, managing subdomains, and the free tools available to make good sites in little time. Until the date this post is published there is not a single paid tool, plugin or template in my site and blog.

Presence in the internet

I’m not a very social individual, so I don’t use to post in my social media, not even in linkedin. So my presence in the internet is very limited, but I always wanted to be there in some way. You can call it a need for social acceptance, and I will not deny it.

This blog

Wanting to write a blog was one of the main motivators for starting the website. I mean, I didn’t want a blog in someone else’s domain. And now that I have a domain I want the website to be about me, like a presentation card for the world, to show that the author of this blog is just a regular guy with a regular career in the software development field, but with potential and desire to acquire more knowledge and share it.

How?

Design

If you don’t want to deal with managing with the different pieces you can opt for a service like GoDaddy or Wix. But I’m not doing that. I’m not a designer, so the simplest way I recommend and what I did in the end was to use a template. I used templates from Html5Up, that are really simple and easy to edit. I also used free usable images from Unsplash. If you use any assets from sites like these don’t forget to credit them.

Domain and hosting

Again the web builder site also offers the solution for this. But if you opted for build the website yourself like me, you can choose another service. Some options are Bluehost, Hostgator and Hostinger. There are a lot of options in the market but I consider only those 3. Select one depending of your needs or preferences, like if you want to use WordPress check if the services allows you to install it. I opted for Hostinger because I wanted the option to have git to pull the code from my repository.

WordPress for blogging

Finally for this blog I am using WordPress. Apart from a free theme I am only using the Polylang plugin to publish the blog in two languages. WordPress is very powerful and is basically a no brainer when you want to start a blog.

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And there you go, in the end the only thing I am paying for is the hosting and the domain name. And that is only because I wanted to have my own domain. But if you want to try out blogging or create your own website reality is you can start for free just investing a bit of time.