Introduction

Recently in sessions, I’ve been working on creating my website that I can put my portfolio onto. As of writing this blog post, I’ve nearly finished – I have one webpage to finish (the portfolio page) before uploading the site to a hosting service, and then once it’s uploaded I’ll be checking to make sure the website works on the internet. Currently it works locally on the computer I’m using to make it, but there are a few elements like the e-mail form that need internet to function.

At first, I started making my website using wordpress, but I found it too over-complicated to use and I couldn’t get the editable “block” style layout to look the way I wanted. Also with the free version of wordpress there is a huge banner at the top of the webpage saying it was made using wordpress.

Instead I decided to code my own website in HTML, as I was sort of familiar with the programming language and I understand how coding works and the things you need to include to produce a result (variables, booleans, syntax etc.).

I created a folder to house all the stuff I needed for the website. All the media I included on the site is in there so that I can link to it in the code, as well as the webpages themselves – which I wrote in notepad.

Here is the code for the home page of the site. I used a w3schools (a code learning site) stylesheet to add some stylistic elements, as I’m not as familiar with CSS and how to create my own stylesheet. I did however use CSS to add things like borders and visual changes to things like videos and images and the nav-bar and footer of the webpages any code that is in-between the <style></style> tags is CSS.

Here are some screenshots of the finished site. Each page functions as intended and includes the important elements of a portfolio website. It also includes some stylistic elements like headers and footers and my logo in the top left corner.

Uploading My Website

I used 000webhost to host my website for free. 000webhost is a web-hosting service owned by Hostinger. On the site, you can upload your website’s files, use WordPress to create a new website, register domains, manage SQL databases and emails.

Here you can see the 000webhost file manager with my website’s files in it.

Here is the link to my website: https://alexnewham.000webhostapp.com/

Conclusion (Reflection)

Overall, making this website was good practise in coding with HTML and CSS and I learned a few things about using those languages and how a website works and links to multiple pages. I also learned about how websites are hosted on the internet. I think my coding of the website went well, but I do think that with more experience in HTML and CSS I would be able to create a website that has some more creative flair – but functionally the website works and fits its purpose. I think I might pay for the web-hosting eventually so that I can customize my URL.