Max Southwood
Portfolio website
Website
Setting up my own website has been on my to-do list for a very long time. I’ve developed some for fun locally, but never ran with the idea until completion. If you’re reading this -it means I stuck with it!
Before I started working on the website itself, I wanted to get the essential web hosting set up first. I decided to go with the hosting first because I didn’t want to go through the steps of exporting, and importing files if I couldn’t decide on a host.
Choosing a host was relatively straight forward, as the web is full of comparison and opinion articles; however, this did sometimes overwhelm me with the many options to go with. I concluded with BlueHost as they had good pricing, speed, lots of features, and excellent reviews.
This is the bit where I confess that this is a WordPress(WP) site. I’d like to code my own website further down the road, but for now I just wanted something hosted and that worked! Using the BlueHost portal to install WP was extremely easy to do. Just required basic information like website name, what I’m planning to use it for, etc. With a few clicks I had installed WP on Bluehost.
Although this was pretty cool, I wanted my website to have a name, in this case MaxSouthwood.co.uk. BlueHost do support the purchasing of domains, however I decided with Names.co.uk as they were running a really good offer on prices! Using a different domain service just added the extra step of pointing the name server to BlueHost’s which was straight forward to do.
I now had a website, hosted on my own domain!
My next task was to find a theme that I liked. I did not expect this part of the process to take long, but choosing my favourite theme took ages! I went with BreezyCV as it had a unique look to it, while also being focused on portfolios and projects. As it’s compatible with WP, installing it was a… breeze! Just needed to go through the process of installing the required plugins so that it worked properly.
As this theme supported a contact form, I wanted to take advantage and use it. I could have used my personal email for this, however I thought I’d use that opportunity to set up my own emails with the maxsouthwood.co.uk domain.