A good friend of mine was opening a new business. We were going through the startup costs, equipment, licenses, insurance, all the usual stuff,and we’d gotten it down to a reasonable number. Then they said: “We’ll need a website. But you’re an IT guy, you can take care of that.”
I am an IT guy. But I’m an infrastructure guy. I build the servers that websites run on. I don’t build the websites themselves. That’s the dev team. They sit on the other side of the office. I don’t know anything about web design, and I told them so.
“Don’t worry. You’re smart. You’ll figure it out.”
I’m still not sure if I took that as a challenge or if there simply wasn’t money to do it any other way. Either way, I said OK.
The next day at work I walked over to my friend, the VP of Development, and said: “So I apparently agreed to build a website, and I have no idea what I’m doing.”
He asked what the site needed to do. Scheduling. Blog posts. E-commerce. Something the business owner could eventually maintain on their own. He rattled off a few options, WordPress, Squarespace, Drupal, a few others,and said WordPress was probably my best bet. Robust plugin ecosystem, well-documented, and the business owner could learn to manage it without a developer.
So I checked it out. Built a LAMP stack on a Mac Mini I had sitting around. I was honestly too cheap to pay for hosting, and I was an IT guy, and goddamn it, I was smart enough to do this myself.
Old me talking to young me: dude, you should have paid the twelve dollars a month.
I had a dynamic IP address from my ISP, so I set up DynDNS to keep it all pointed in the right direction. Got WordPress installed. Hello World. And then I had to figure out what to actually do with it.
Over the next couple of months I’d work on it for a few hours, hit a wall, Google most of my questions, and occasionally walk back over to the VP of Dev for the ones Google couldn’t answer. The business owner would give me creative concepts, and I’d figure out how to build them. Slowly, it turned into a real site.
Fast forward to today, wherever “today” is when you’re reading this,and it’s a Docker container. One command on a Linux box and you have a WordPress site. Plugins have grown tremendously. You don’t have to be a developer anymore. But having spent a few years learning it the hard way makes it that much easier this time around.
My site isn’t perfect. Anyone who visits is welcome to their opinions. This is where I’m at right now, and that’s the whole point, it gives me the ability to write what I’m writing, and it gives you the ability to read it.
What I do with this in the future, who knows. But for now, this is where we are and this is what we have.
Have a good night. See you soon.