I’m a .NET developer by trade, I know how to build a website, so why is this one wordpress?
The answer is simple really, building a CMS from scratch is very time consuming process and most of the internet runs on WordPress anyway. I had a very negative opinion of WP for the longest time but I have ‘matured’ as a developer and got over my “.NET is the best for everything” and settled very much in the camp of “you need to pick the right tools for the job” and I wanted to build a blog type website so this is it!
That said there are millions of bad examples of WordPress. It’s so easy to use that anyone with 20 minutes and a tiny bit of know-how can get a basic website up and running in a day but I see this as both a fantastic feature but also a major downfall. It is the reason that so many WordPress sites are so bad.
The task I am setting for myself over the next 12 months is to spend on average 1 hour a day building this site with the condition that it must be done properly. I am going to document my journey and write guides for everything that I find interesting. That’s right: it is going to be a wordpress blog about building a WordPress blog! I aim to do as much myself as possible with the learning process being a priority over speed. I’m not a graphical designer but hope to improve there too!
Don’t worry that’s not all I will be posting. See my post about this sites purpose here for more details on that!
For starters this is a self hosted WordPress site on a digitalocean droplet, using Nginx as the webserver. The first step is, of course, to create content for the website. This is going to be my focus for the next 2 months at least. I prefer working iteratively in almost everything I do so I will be ‘burst’ writing about whatever takes my fancy at the time. This will likley result in a collection of content without much focus so at the 10 separate pieces of content I will review what I have created and try to hone in the content and refine it. Most likey with some massive edits and a bit more of a plan to move forward with. The hardest thing about this website for me has always been the getting started phase so if I can burst through that I’ll be really happy!!
A few other things I intend to cover are (not in a particular order):
- Free SSL using Let’s Encrypt (A rated at least)
- Setting up Google Analytics to work for me
- Plugging any security gaps WordPress may have
- Ensuring no errors occur anywhere on the site with some kind of automated test
- Backing up the site and content
- Keeping the MySQL instance clean and secure
- Ensure good performance with some form of testing
- Mailing List
- Creating a Custom Theme
- Creating a plugin (not sure what for but would like to know how!)
- Learning and growing the engagement on the site
- Social Media integration
- Learning and getting better at SEO
- Creating something to track the sites performance
- Get better at writing
- Improve my discipline and keep the site moving forward!
Hopefully you’ll join me on this journey of learning and if there is anything else you would like to see, I’m more than happy to take suggestions and would love to hear from you!