On being self-reliant in building websites
About two-and-a-half years ago, my good friend Rebecca Bollwitt (Miss604) helped me secure my domain name (e.g. Hummingbird604.com) and move from just having a WordPress.com blog to having clean URLs (that map directly without the .wordpress.com). I was so proud of myself that I blogged about how I did it. It became one of my most popular blog posts. In November of 2008, I decided to host my sites in an external server outside of WordPress.com. My good friend J. Karen Parker moved all my three websites to the server where they are currently hosted and customized the WordPress theme Deviant Art to make it look and do what I wanted it to do.
My professional activity is NOT building websites. I am primarily an academic and researcher who dabbles occasionally in the field of social media consulting, given that I am a power user and love applying the tools of social networking and this kind of consulting project. BUT, I also love doing my own stunts (to quote my beloved Jennifer Garner).
So, in the past week, I decided that I needed to rebuild my consultancy website. So I bought the new domain, created the WordPress database I needed to install WordPress 3.0.1, FTP’d WordPress on to my server and installed it. All by myself. Of course, I did ask Twitter a few questions and my good friend Catherine Winters was very helpful (thanks also to everyone who answered on Twitter). But for the most part (I’d say 99%), I did it all by myself. Suffering through the sometimes horrendously complicated documentation both for my host and for WordPress (I love you Matt, Andy, Lloyd, but the Codex needs some serious rewriting).
Once I saw the “WordPress has been installed” sign and got on to my login and entered my credentials and launched the Dashboard, I almost wanted to shed a tear. I did it. I am able to install my own WordPress and create a website should I ever need to do it again. I am self-reliant.
You could say “well, you *could* hire someone to do this“. And yes, I could (theoretically, if money wasn’t a constraint, which in my case, IS very much a constraint). But the most rewarding feeling to me was to know that, come hell or high water, and even though my hosting company is pretty raw in what it offers (e.g. it doesn’t have a very non-geek-friendly CPanel), I can, if I need to, build another website from scratch and generate everything I need on my own.
And that is an amazing feeling.
Related posts:
- Building an Online Community with WordPress (aka Blogging 101)
- My yyjWordCamp talk on integrated socmed WP site building
- Building Your Brand with Your Company Blog (liveblog)
- Building connections off and online
- Updating websites, blogs, CVs, etc…
Always a great step to do it yourself! It’s funny, once you know how, it seems fairly easy, except I usually forget one simple thing like WP-config or something.
Congratulations once more on the DIY.
Hey, Raul! I just saw this, and wanted to say you’re welcome, and I hope everything has worked out well since then!