Creating a Website

Stage: Planning

Arguably the most important step in creating any program is the planning stage. Avoiding scope creep, deciding the duration of development needed, and managing the required level of output to meet a set launch date is what seperates hobbist and professionals.

For my personal website I decided my needs would be best met by:

Acquiring a domain name.
A Digital Ocean (DO) Droplet.
A lightweight and simple backend.
No specific frontend.
A layout and color scheme that conveyed professionalism.
A Contact form.

Stage: Shopping

My critera for a good domain name is simple: easy to remember, preferably ".com", and inexpensive. I shopped around on a few domain registers like Namecheap and Cloudflare as I already had a domain in mind. Ultimately I settled on namecheap as they had elijahdonaldson.com for the cheapest price, always do a quick google for promo codes as this saved me ~$20.

My budget is tight for this project as I don't expecta large amount of traffic to my website. This makes a DO droplet ideal as they begin at $4 USD a month and can be upgraded at anytime. This puts my monthly cost at a little under ~$5 USD per month when the domains cost is averaged out.

Additionally, if you'd like to support me and try out DO, you can use this link to get a $200 credit for 60 days and you make my server free for a little while.

Stage: The Backend

As my resources are as limited as my time, I decided to use Nginx and Flask. it's lightweight, and very simple to get going. Additionally Jinja will take care of the small front end considerations.

While my standard procedure would usually be to setup a MySQL server, I have only a single contact form. As I'm not currently planning to advertise my site, I don't need to track users with UTMs. If that changed in the future I may consider using HubSpot or setting up a database but for now my single contact form can be automatically sent to my email much the same as my error logs are.

Stage: The Frontend

A lot has been written about the psychology of colors and designs. While I do broadly take these things into consideration, I largely chose based on what I thought looked cool from recent media exposure. A black background to convey a serious, no nonsense professionalism. a golden/yellow color for accent borders as these felt high tech, and clean white for the text.

While it is technically a little overkill for a single form, I decided I wanted to do things right and included two previous utility scripts I've created seperately for use in multiple projects: UTM-storage and Form-Autofill The first ensures UTMs survive and are stored correctly as a user navigates the website, and the second can use the first or a previous form fill to auto fill a form.

As my main goal is ultimately to advertise myself, I decided I wanted a fixed header/footer as these would contain the core roles I wanted to be hired for and the places I could be hired. This adds in the extra consideration of always needing to add padding to ensure the pages main section would not be covered. As such I decided to offload as much of the menu to the hamburger/mobile menu as possible and make it available at all sizes instead of only smaller sizes.

With that done, I needed only to draft the copy and begin building.

Interested in hiring me?