I have built a few websites in the past, when I was a kid and such but only ever using ‘What You See Is What You Get’ (WYSIWYG, pronounced wizzy wig) internet platforms. They worked and were simple to use, just like dragging and dropping images and text in Microsoft Word. I had even managed to set up the DNS (Domain Name Server) records and email so that they looked ‘professional’.

While I learn how to use a computer properly, I thought building websites for people would be an easy way to earn a crust until I could learn to code and build things for real.

There is an adage in programming that I now understand a lot more:

We do these things not because they are easy, but because we thought they were going to be easy."

-The Programmers’ Credo

While looking to register domain names, some registrars offered website building services, e.g. Squarespace. I wondered why there were options to hire a professional developer when they had their own DIY version, with AI!

I was about to find out.

(Side note: More evidence that AI is not a silver bullet . If it was that good, they wouldn’t let us use it, Big Tech would keep it for themselves)

I received a request from my first client to build a website. This was good news but it had not come to me through a cold email. It was through my personal network. They weren’t asking for much in terms of design but I wanted to a great job for them because:

  1. I want my work to be as good as I can make it.
  2. I wanted to use it as a learning opportunity to understand more and improve on my skill issues.
  3. No fees had been discussed so I planned to deliver such a fantastic site that my client would give me a generous donation.

Because of these reasons I did not intend on using an online site builder. I wanted to do things properly and for real but I knew there was no way I was going to code it from scratch using only HTML and CSS (although that was the next course on the Khan Academy I was about to take).

WordPress had been in tech news a lot because of a public spat What is WordPress and who is Matt Mullenweg?

As any publicity is good publicity, I took the bait and decided to use it to design the site for my client. I think it was a good choice as it used enough technical knowledge and command line interface for me to feel like a professional (or at least less of a laymen) which was precisely the kind of dopamine inducing mini-success I needed. It keeps me learning through the hard times.

There are easier, more expensive ways to do a one-click set-up of a website but for me it was a fun learning experience self-hosting.. It also makes good business sense as the money I saved through knowledge meant there was a price margin I could profit from and still remain competitive. I would also be saving my client huge amounts of time. Self-hosting is also a way to ensure you own your digital property fully. If the website becomes a success, self hosting means it is easier to sell on if you choose to.

I used Digital Ocean for a Virtual Private Server as I still had some free credits left on my trial. From there it is possible to spin up a WordPress server that adds Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress.

With the server setup and being able to login into WordPress from the browser, I expected to spend a day dragging and dropping boxes around to produce the site and then get back to customising Vim and psyching myself up to make the switch from Windows to Arch Linux. I refer you back to The Programmers’ Credo.

It is a common misconception that WordPress is purely a blog site builder. That’s what I thought it was. You will quickly learn that “over 43% of the world wide web is built on WordPress”. It was this discovery that meant I went in with the opposite misconception. I thought it would be a very simple and intuitive builder. But there is a disconnect between the legacy functions and what it has become. Without the legacy backstory I found it difficult to make sense of how it all fit together.

It took me a while to understand that what you are dealing with is a back-end development dashboard. To add a page is simple. You can design and shape the page but what confused me was the page preview looks nothing like the layout you have designed in terms of alignment etc.

Note to self: Read the documentation

Naturally, I started to look at the Themes Library. A lot of which are vying for a premium payment. I was open to the idea of paying until I tried to customise the themes to my design preferences. I quickly realised that there was no way I would be able to build the website I wanted to deliver in any reasonable amount of time this way. I must have started and deleted about six to eight attempts over the course of three days.

I could just not find a flow state. The design was questionable and I knew I was digging myself into a hole. I hadn’t even started with internal links, buttons and other features like contact forms. It just didn’t feel right.

There are a few things with working with computers that we should all remember.

  1. If you are facing a problem you can be sure someone else has had the exact same problem and there will be a solution out there.
  2. You don’t know what you don’t know - there are often tools out there for the job you are doing which are much more elegant and suitable than what you are using, you just need to research and find them.
  3. Read the documentation - I only tend to do this when I care enough about something, the rest of the time I revert to YouTube (which is not good practice, the answers are in the documentation and the 10 minutes of reading these dull tomes can save you hours of frustration).

Eventually, I stumbled across Elementor and Divi.

Elementor had a free option off the bat so that’s what I started experimenting with.

Elementor is a page builder, a no-code solution to the problems I was encountering. Now, in my first welcome post I Hate Tech So Much I Am Teaching Myself How To Code one of the biggest reasons I loathed computers was the frustrations I encountered trying to do basic things like move an image on a Microsoft Word Document without sending the text all over the place. Welcome to Elementor who have successfully 10-exed this frustration with their containers abstraction.

There is something else that people working with computers should also remember and that is when something is labelled as “powerful” read an extremely frustrating learning experience (especially when you don’t read the documentation) but if you can stick it out, you can do cool stuff with it.

I did manage to get in to some sort of flow with Elementor, not just because of the software but because of my failed attempts taught me to plan the process much more systematically in advance by:

  • Gathering all of the content and text under first.
  • Collecting a library of images I thought I might use (I used www.pexels.com for free to use, high quality images).
  • Developing wireframes.

These steps really helped as it reduced the amount of thinking and decision making I needed to do. I could just follow the plan and save my metal energy to get creative.

(I will write more on these lessons learned later)

After I had designed the landing page it allowed me to generate templates from the sections I knew I would use again on the other pages by looking at the wire frames. This was a big time saver and ensured consistency across the whole site. After a few days of teething problems, I was in the flow.

Now, I did manage to deliver a draft site to the client. They were happy with it and wanted to pursue it further. This was great news but I had not managed to deliver something to my own standards. I knew I could do more and I was already making plans to surpass the clients expectation.

For this I just didn’t feel like WordPress was the answer. Although it is powerful and I am sure I could build something great with it, the workflow just did not seem to click with me.

WordPress could be a suitable end-point (although I don’t know how secure things are now Matt Mullenweg has become a super villain) but I personally wanted to go deeper into the rabbit hole. I wanted more direct control over what I was building. The merits of learning to code became more apparent and I was excited to delve deeper…