How did I develop a website?

In this post, I am gonna explain about how did I develop my first web project.

Actually, I have never developed a real website; the greatest thing I have ever done was building blogs using templates.

My friend who I worked together in the conference offered me a project which was to develop a website for her organization.

I thought it wouldn’t be that difficult for me to take such responsibility.

I have some web developer friends, I can do most of the work and if there was something needed to be solved by professionals, I thought I could ask to my friend.

In reality, starting from collecting information, making a mockup and figuring out to be able to upload on server were all not not easy tasks.

Firstly, I researched how to write a proposal on Google search engine.

After submitting the proposal, designing the website step became a challenge.

Again, I researched some elegant themes on Google, discussed with my friend whether she liked it or not.

If I got confirmation, I began developing stage.

Fortunately, I chose WordPress to manage contents, which is simple and a lot of useful plugins can be found in the store.

Since I didn’t have prior knowledge on which plugins should I use, I tested recommended plugins from tech blogs, one by one.

Experienced developers recommended to develop website offline on your computer.

So I followed their suggestion ,but building a workplace to be able to handle that website in my computer was also a complicated task.

After drafting the website, another step is to upload it online.

I rented  a hosting and domain name from a US based company.

Again, I didn’t know how to upload this huge website on the database.

Couples of days were spent to be able to find the appropriate solution.

I used a plugin called “Duplicator”, installed it on WordPress, export the frame of the website, but media data were left behind.

Finally, I successfully migrated the website to online database and then, linked it with the domain name.

There were more details steps in the process , but I will leave it for now.

Remaining data such as images and videos were compressed into a zip folder and uploaded separately into cpanel of the hired hosting.

After I placing the media folder at the right location, website was available live online

It was actually not a final step, in order to make sure the functionality of the website, I uploaded and removed several times before I handed it over to the client.

Monthly backup schedule was also set up by defining the backup location in free cloud storage, Dropbox.

I tested the speed of the website with some speedster which said I need to reduce image size to make it faster.

I did all the necessary tasks I thought I should do.

However, I forgot to hide my personal information during registering the website.

Although I hid it as soon as I realized that is security weakness, I cannot erase remaining traces which are all on google.

I created several tutorial videos alongside with website manual and handed it over to the client.

I successfully finished up my project .

As an experience, I knew basic stages of web development.

My only weakness was unable to perform coding.

 I could not be sure how high is the website security though I used some security services from a hosting company.

Whenever I have spare time, I used to look up the website.

I am quite satisfied with my work . Despite not being perfect, it is still a good looking one among other ugly websites.