Building My Portfolio Site
Back in 2016, when I was a grad student at UNC, I built a simple WordPress portfolio website for myself using the school’s free hosting solution. That was alright, but of course I let that site (and all its content) slip into the ether when UNC erased my account after graduation.
When it finally came time to start a new site, I didn’t have an obvious solution like UNC’s web.unc.edu. I thought about an all-in-one solution like Squarespace, but I figured I could probably do something just as well for a lower cost. Furthermore, I thought I might learn a few things about web development on the way. After all, in my role I usually just get to tell someone how a site should look or work without having to do any of the work myself.
I landed on using Amazon Lightsail to host my site. Even though Lightsail has a quick setup feature for Drupal (with which I work frequently), I decided to use WordPress, since it is actually less familiar to me than Drupal. Why not make sure I learn something new?
Lightsail was fantastically simple to use (at least at a basic level), and I had a site up and running over the course of half a lunch break. I’m sure that I will be tweaking things and I go along. Why wouldn’t I? But with everything set up so quickly, I realized that content would be much more of a challenge than getting the site set up. This is no surprise to me; I tell clients that content is the hardest part of almost any web project. That’s where I’ll be focusing my efforts from here on out. I’ll be writing up past projects and blogging about my work.