Personal Website 101

Steps for building personal website with minimum efforts.

Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

Motivation

There is very little need to explain the benefits of personal website or a portfolio site, still, I would note down some:

• Personal Branding
• Blog Space
• Makes you discoverable on internet
• One stop resume which works for you
• Helps you learn new skills while building

In few sections below, I tried to explain how I built my first personal website.

Tech Stack

• Hugo Static Site Builder
• Plenty of theme/templates available at Hugo Themes
• Hosting on Github Pages
• Domain name from Godaddy

Steps

• First learn the basics of Hugo and how it works by following Hugo Quickstart Guide
• Once comfortable with Markdown and Hugo, choose a template/theme for your site, you can create your custom theme as well.
• After choosing a theme, customize your site based on your need.
• Verify your site locally at http://localhost:1313 (Assuming you did not change the config)
• At this point, your stack is setup to build your site locally.
• Finish multiple iterations of changes till you are satisfied with the website you want to build.

At this point, you have your website up and running locally. Next step is to host it on some hosting platform, in my case it is on github pages.

Hosting

• There are multiple options to host your static website. Eg: Github pages, BitBucket, Netlify, GitLab
• In my case, I used GitHub Pages and deployed site at hpj1992.github.io
• I use this site as a pre-production/staging environment for my actual website.
• Not including detailed information because there are plenty of resources available online.

Domain

• Once you figure out the hosting issues, it is time to purchase a domain for your website.
• If you do not want specific domain — which is perfectly valid — you can start sharing links from your github pages.
• If you do decide to purchase a domain, there are multiple options in this case as well and the best option varies based on individual. Eg: GoDaddy, Bluehost etc.
• Some well known domain providers are listed here.
• Domain registration fees $10/year.
• Privacy protection for domain priced at $10/year.
• Did not opt for HTTPS certificate because I do not need it currently.
• Followed link my GoDaddy domain to Github Pages youtube video to link my hosted website to domain.

End Result

• Website up and running: http://joshiharshit.com/