I’ve wanted to build my own website. I’ve been doing some research for the past week. Here are what I’ve learned along the journey.
- Choose a name for the website. I am not talking about the name of the website although you have to think of a title after you set up the website. But before all of those things, we need to find a domain name for the website. You could buy the domain name here ⏎ (Namecheap) and Google also provides this service. Check here ⏎.
- Do you want to self-hosted your own website? Or do you prefer using popular blogging platforms? For example, Wix, Blogger, Squarespace, etc.
- If self-hosted, what web framework is the best for us? The answer depends on you, actually. What kind of website are you going to build? A personal blog or a business website are really different. Here I am going to focus on personal blog in this article.
- Even you choose to self-hoste your own site, but you don’t want to be too technical. Or you are not familiar with programming. There are 2 open source and popular content management systems (CMS) I recommend: Wordpress and Ghost. Please see the last section of this article here ⏎ for more information. All you need to do is install the software to the computer. And done!
- What cloud do I pick up? Of course we could just have a server in our houses and running all of frameworks, software, and contents by ourselves. However, there are a lot of works to do and maintain. I’d strongly recommend to choose a cloud computing platform. There are Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) to choose from. Currently, AWS is the leader of this market.
Now you have a domain name, and assumed you picked AWS as your cloud computing platform. And you chose WordPress to install to the AWS. Now it’s time to write your contents of the website.
WordPress and Ghost
“WordPress” here means the software, the content management system. I am not referring to wordpress.com. The key different is wordpress.com is the blog/website platform. You don’t need to do anything. You just sign up an account and ready to go/write. But it’s not self-hosted anymore.
If you want to self-hosted, then you’ll need to download WordPress software and have it installed to the computer. Please go here to download it.
Besides WordPress, there is another popular open source blogging platform worth checking out: Ghost.
Ghost was founded in April 2013, after a very successful Kickstarter campaign to create a new platform focused solely on professional publishing. Our mission is to create the best open source tools for independent journalists and writers across the world, and have a real impact on the future of online media. — Ghost.com
Like WordPress, there are 2 ways you could use. One is just go to their website and sign up an account. The most basic plan will cost you $29 per month. The other choice is just download the software and install it to your server/cloud.
I haven’t written about what web frameworks we can use. That’s because if we choose WordPress or Ghost, then we don’t need to use web framework anymore. It reduces our works a lot. If you want to focus on writing contents for your blog or you don’t want to spend too much time on programming your own website. WordPress and Ghost might be a better choice. However, using a web framework could give your way much more flexibility to your website. If you had some programming background, I think it may be worth considering.
Next article I’ll write about some web frameworks to consider for self-hosted website. Stay tuned. :)
