Website In An Hour
The personal webspace of James Dunn
The amount the web has progressed in the last couple of years became especially apparent to me last weekend when I managed to set up a fully functional blog on it's own domain within an hour of having the idea.
My girlfriend Caroline is shortly due travel to Nepal for six weeks where she will complete a month's medical elective, and trek to the Everest base camp over ten days. Such an opportunity is the perfect subject to blog about so I suggested that she sign up with Blogger instead of sending emails home and attaching photos. Then I thought 'why stop there?'
I am of the opinion that it's not just web designers or people in the IT industry who find their own site useful. It shows that you take yourself seriously, have some level of technical competence, and is a great place for potential employers to find out more about you and download your CV. It also gives you your own email address which is always going to look better than the generic @hotmail.com. I'd almost go as far to say that every graduate looking for a professional job needs their own site.
With this in mind I checked the availability of some domains, and found that caroline-black.com was available. Already having my own account with Dreamhost meant that registering this name was easy, and within five minutes it was done.
However, the key to the whole site is the simplicity of Blogger. By default Blogger gives you a sub domain at blogspot.com, but if you look at the more "advanced" options, it has full support for creation of a blog on any website utilizing its built in FTP system. We were able to choose a pre-made template, write the first article and the rest was automatically taken care of. Future updates and all of the settings can be done from the Blogger website.
Obviously this method of building a site has some severe limitations, including the lack of a custom template and only a limited amount of flexibility in general. However, in a time vs. build situation it is defiantly a winner. Have a look at the result here: http://www.caroline-black.com.
Posted on February 18, 2008 19:13 | Add Comment →