I finally created a website!

2024-11-08

Creating a website is not easy. In fact, if it were not for Astro, I would never have been able to do it. Thanks Astro Documentation! (And thanks for me for never surrending even under thousand and thousand of errors). This post is just an explanation of how I created my website and all the steps I had to go through. I hope this post helps someone else who is trying to create a website.

How it started

I always wanted to *build a simple and clean website to share my thoughts and projects. I started by trying to take inspiration through youtubers like Aiden Andrews which I THANK for giving me the inspiration to build a website like his. I was never an enthusiast of web development, when I was in High School I learnt basic HTML, CSS and Javascript but nothing too crazy and we never went to deep in learning this languages. Just to have a little insight, my very first website I made using the “basic-devolopment-kit” for fools (HTML, CSS and Javascript) was terrible. Complete messed up styling, blue text over black background, no responsivity at all, and a lot of other things that I don’t even want to remember. Then in last year we learnt about the existence of different frameworks but we never actually used them in class and that’s really a shame… I think that if we had learnt about them, I would have been more interested in web development and I would have started to learn more about it way before now. In fact, this site was firstly built only with the big-three and nothing else. Yes, I was ambitious. Yes, I was stupid. Because the code was a complete mess, totally not grasping the concept of well-structured/written code. Being able to divide the site in components was completely not possible.

I procristinated a lot before starting to learn about Astro and how to build a website with it. I was always scared of not being able to do it, of not being able to understand the documentation, of not being able to understand the code, of not being able to understand the errors that I would have encountered. Nevertheless I have to thank my friend Fabio who suggested switching up to a framework like Astro instead of using the basic HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Switching to a proper framework

The first thing I have done to start learning Astro was to read the documentation. Fortunately the documentation is really well written and easy to understand. I was able to understand the basics of Astro in a couple of hours and I was able to start building my website in a couple of days. I have to say that the first time I tried to build the website with Astro, I was not able to do it. I was not able to understand the errors that I was encountering and I was not able to understand how to fix them. I was really frustrated and I was about to give up. Like almost everything I tend to create and do, but I guess it’s an “everyone” starting point. When you first try to do things you never done you will eventually fail so I guess it’s normal not being able to grasp the concepts initially. But perseverance is the key to success, so I decided to not give up and to try again. And I’m glad I did it. Because now I created what I wanted, even though it’s not perfect, but it’s mine and it’s a start. So a suggestion I would give to everyone who wants to go through the road of becoming a computer scientist or a developer is to never give up, even if you fail a thousand times. You will eventually succeed. I know it sounds a bit corny but I guess I’m a bit corny.

Suggestions

So if you wanna start doing a website:

  1. Learn the basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. Even though I just stated that creating one with only these three is a mess, it’s still important to know the main and essential key traits about all three.
  2. Choose a framework (or a CMS perhaps) to work with. I suggest Astro because it’s really easy to learn and it’s really well documented. But a friend of mine could suggest Svelte.
  3. Read the documentation of the framework you chose. It’s really important to understand the basics of the framework you are working with.
  4. Try to do some simple projects with the framework you chose. It’s really important to practice what you have learnt.
  5. After doing some simple stuff, start building your website. It’s really important to start building your website as soon as possible. You will learn a lot of things by doing it.
  6. Don’t give up!
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