Creating a website from scratch

Creating a website is second nature today. Any project you have, whether it is a business or a hobby, the medium to present it is a website.

There are many options that don't require any coding. All you have to do is find a hosting company that offers blog engines. You have Godaddy, hostgator, or the many shared hosting providers. They allow you to install WordPress with a single click. Even if you use a dedicated server it is still easy to install WordPress.

The advantage of WordPress is that it allows you to get started right away without having to learn how to code.

But today, we won't be using any of these pre-built solutions, we are going to create a blog from scratch. Scary huh? We are going to make use of a LAMP stack, LAMP stands for Linux Apache MySQL and PHP.

I wrote an article before for how to install them on a service provider like Digitalocean.com.

Wise feather

Be wise, don't use frameworks!

Here is how I got started with this blog. I didn't jump straight to the technical details, I started with writing the content I wanted people to read. After all this is the most important part of the blog. Writing. And as you can see I'm not very good at it. Even though I'm a programmer, I still type slow. But this is to motivate you that you don't need to be exceptional to create something amazing.

Anyway, my first step is to create an article like the one you see here. In my case, I'm creating a programming blog, but you can use the same procedure to create whatever you want. If you are creating a picture blog, you can use a fancier editor to add images and such. But for me, I like a clean distraction free environment to get started.

My process is simple. Write everything in a Notepad type of editor (Gedit in my case), then I copy it to a word document that has fancier features. Note I don't even pay attention to errors. Who know I probably have so much errors on these few paragraphs I wrote.

Once I am done writing and finished correcting all the errors, I do the next important step. How do I present this content to the user? That's when design comes in. Again, I don't use anything fancy. I use Sublime text editor for that.

I create all the HTML and CSS for the page that will display the article. There is no need to create a whole website before getting started. You have to remember, your website does not simply fade away, you write for the long term. My favorite blogs have been around for more than a decade and I know they will keep on existing for longer.

So let's end this blog post now and get to the design. For now, thank you for reading and I shall see you in the next section.