My website building started in the early 2000s with manually written html sent via ftp to a host. Mostly it was a way to share pictures before it there were countless easier ways to share pictures.
In 2021 I put up a site on AWS. It was a static blog hosted insecurely on S3 but it worked. That evolved into a custom domain, www.mclaughlin.world, hosted on GoDaddy and run through WordPress in 2022.
There were 2 big challenges with that setup:
- GoDaddy was hard to use. I knew what I was trying to do, and I found the website and the processes confusing. The intro vs ongoing pricing was crazy. However, it was easy enough to get a domain and tie it to a site. It was good at the time, but if I knew then what I know now I’d do it differently. Well, I did do it differently this time.
- Stepping into WordPress from a basic html mindset had a steep learning curve. Luckily that was a temporary challenge. Using WordPress was more of an attitude change than a technical change. After awhile the interface is managable. The workings behind the interface are complex.
I parted ways with GoDaddy when my term expired. This new site is hosted differently, but hosting is a topic of its own for another post.
For site building I’m now using Hugo. Unlike WordPress' database driven, active sites, Hugo builds static sites. There are functional differences between the two but this option works very well for what I am doing here now.
I have a few more enhancements in mind. More to come on that.
Questions or comments? Use the email link at the bottom of any page.