Building a website
Written on April 16th, 2020 by JamesMaking a website from scratch is fun and also cheap.
You don’t need Wordpress and you don’t need a fancy “Click here to chat with our sales team!” web hosting provider. You just need a text editor and about $20 USD per year.
I built this site using Jekyll. Jekyll takes markdown formatted text files and converts them into html for you. Then it builds the website directory structure ready to copy to your hosting provider’s server.
I host with nearlyfreespeech.net. They are a bare bones (lol just check out their website and compare it to something like godaddy.com) zero-bells-and-whistles hosting provider with strong ethics and no bullshit. You also pay for what you use, so if your site (like this one) gets next to zero traffic you pay almost nothing.
This site’s design is mostly simple html with minimal css styling. This is for two reasons:
- I’m new to web design and still learning
- It’s super light-weight
Light-weight web design is where it’s at. It’s clean and aesthetically pleasing, and also it’s low data cost. This page is about 3kb.
I encrypt my page for free with letsencrypt.org.
All images are optimised as well as I know how to use up as little bandwidth as possible. Optimised is just a fancy word for scaled down and exported using just-before-you-can-tell-the-difference compression levels. If an image is only rendered on your site at 1000 px, then why upload it at 2000 px? It’s just a waste of data.
When it comes time to upload a new post I just copy my local refreshed build directories by ssh direct to the host server.
Hit me up by email (see Home for my email address) if you want some help setting up your own site.
/James