Three months ago, I bought my domain name and subscribed to a hosting plan.
This was not my first time building a personal website, but this time, I was dead serious. The website would become a fixture of my life.
I am working a full-time job, so my free time to work on the website has been:
- Lunch breaks (bye bye midday naps)
- Three weekday evenings when I don’t have a dance class or other commitments
- Saturdays, after a slow morning
- Sunday evenings after teaching
I gotta say, I was not so focused at first.
My problem is I have great ambition but not the skills to make it come true.
But since mid-April, I finally found my momentum and got my game on!
… only to have committed several deadly sins in web design.
Certain things about me:
- I’m a writer and a teacher
- I’m not a web designer
- I don’t know how to code (and wouldn’t be good at it)
- I’m an amateur graphic designer on Canva
- I’m a fast learner with an active imagination
Given those qualities, I now have a homepage that I’m revising 343th times (last check), some skeleton boring pages, and nothing on the main attraction – the blog.
This has been a much deeper learning curve than I had expected.
The reasons for doing this still stand. But the clock is ticking.
I need to make a lot of mistakes fast, and learn from them even faster.
But if I can do it, so could you – writers who want to build their own website and earn money from it.
I’m getting happier with my homepage and global site settings. I’m learning A LOT.
And my fingers are itching to write. The writer in me despairs at the empty blog.
Thus, I’ve started this series of posts to document my ups and downs in building a personal website as a writer.
It is messy. It has more fails than wins. But the wins are so worth it.
And I dream of the day when I can preen in front of you all:
I did it myself.
