In this post, I’ll walk through how I built this website. It was fairly straightforward, although I ended up using a few different tools to keep everything cheap and under my control. Everything was done in WordPress, with the exception of a couple of third-party tools that host my comments and collect emails, since my website is a static site1.
1. XAMPP
To start, I use XAMPP to create a web server on which I run WordPress. Please don’t ask me what everything means; my web server technical skills begin and end at simply getting it up and running.
2. WordPress
Once I’m in WordPress, things are a little more straightforward. I use the standard Gutenberg editor with Spectra, which gives me some cookie-cutter templates to use for the various components of the site. From there, it’s simply a matter of arranging and organizing my pages and their elements to my liking.
Now, usually WordPress runs PHP for its dynamic aspects, such as forms, comments, and other elements. Because I don’t want to spend the money for such things, I use the Simply Static plugin, which allows me to export my site files as strictly HTML and CSS.
3. Dynamic Elements
Because my site is static, I have to rely on third-party resources to run both my forms and the comment system for my blog posts. I use Formspark to collect emails for my email list, as well as for my contact form. For my comment system, I chose to go with Chirpy. Running these on my site is as simple as linking the elements to use their respective third-party tools using HTML.
4. Hosting
My website files are uploaded to a GitHub repository, which is linked to Cloudflare Pages, where my website is then deployed. I considered simply using GitHub Pages; however, I use Cloudflare for my domain, so it made it simple enough to use them for deployment too. I only paid $8 for the whole year to use my domain, which is especially a steal when compared to other website services that charge much more to build and deploy a dynamic site. Squarespace’s basic tier costs $16 per month on its own! While they provide more functionality right out of the box, by using WordPress to build a static site and then using free third-party resources, I end up achieving similar functionality to what I would if I did it that way, while staying at 4.17% the cost of the cheapest plan on Squarespace.
5. Conclusion
There was a period of time I learned basic web design; however, the method I used to build this site is a bit less technical than if I had gone that route, and also gives me more time to focus on being creative and writing music. I would 100% recommend to anyone considering building a website to give WordPress a shot. Just make sure to use wordpress.org and not wordpress.com. The former is open source; the latter isn’t and is more expensive.
- For more information on the difference between a dynamic and static website: https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/websites-apps/static-vs-dynamic-website/ ↩︎