Building a website hosted on my own personal domain has been one of the biggest items on my professional to-do list, and it's finally done. Looking back at everything that went into it, I picked up a lot more than I expected to.

Starting with a template

I began by taking an HTML template off the internet and slowly making it my own. That process taught me the basics: how to create pages, link them together, add code snippets and images, and edit text without breaking the layout. It was a low-stakes way to get comfortable poking around in code that someone else had written.

Learning CSS

Next came CSS. I spent a lot of time scanning through style sheets trying to figure out what code corresponded to what on the actual page. Eventually it clicked: I understood how CSS pairs with an HTML page, and how to manipulate it to change colors, spacing, and everything else about how a site looks and feels.

Getting it online

The next step was actually hosting the site somewhere. After some research, I landed on GitHub's free Pages hosting to get everything live. That solved the "is it online" problem, but created a new one: anyone I sent the link to could pull it up, but there was no way to search my name and have the page show up.

Buying my own domain

That sent me down a research hole on buying and connecting a custom domain. After some trial and error and a lot of domain registrar sites visited, I bought avaweisheit.com and connected it to my GitHub Pages site through DNS.

A full redesign

With that foundation in place, I worked with Claude to take the site well beyond the original template: a full navy and green redesign, projects reorganized into their own folders, an Articles section so I can keep publishing pieces like this one, and the technical SEO work (Google Search Console, a sitemap, domain verification) that actually makes the site findable when someone searches my name instead of just working when I send the link directly.

Where I landed

I feel like the site actually represents me and my personality now, not just a template with my name swapped in. Along the way I got genuinely comfortable pushing and pulling from git, structuring HTML pages, and understanding what actually goes into building and maintaining a website end to end. Hopefully this gives you a glimpse into that process, and where it's gotten me so far.