I can not believe that I have 2 months left with Flatiron School, and hopefully by then I can officially call myself a Full-Stack Software Engineer. 👩🏻💻
Aside from revamping my resume, I have been working on building my personal site. After weeks of debating if I should be building from scratch or not, I decided to deploy my first portfolio site from a ready-made HTML5 template. I can always refine my portfolio site later as I develop more skills, and eventually design my own UI components.
Starting Point
Not sure where to start, I looked for advice from freeCodeCamp. I found this tutorial of How to Put a Website Online, and it was extremely useful in providing guidance for someone (like me) who has no knowledge on buying a custom domain, hosting and outsourcing a template. I had fun perusing through Pixelarity where you can browse HTML responsive template designs. Basic skills required include HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The next step was trying to figure out my custom domain. Funny thing, this effort frustrates me the most, and I could not make up my mind. Long story short, I ended up re-branding myself to @fentybit, and settled on fentybit.me. I love numbers, and hence, bit or binary digit. Then, I mulled over .dev and .me for quite some time. I learned from other developers and their thoughts on .dev domain, and I settled on .me. I want my site to personally share who I am and what I am, in the most minimalistic way. I am glad the custom domain was still available. Thank you Namecheap.
Personalize your Site
Personalizing HTML/CSS attributes and content delivery took most of my time, but Pixelarity made it so effortless! If there is anything new, it would be trying to link my contact page so other devs can communicate back to me. Formspree provides this service. I only need to submit their API to my front-end code, and they take care of the rest. 📝
Namecheap && Netlify
While there are a lot of hosting providers such as Bluehost, GoDaddy, Hostinger, DreamHost and so on, you can always get free ones from either Netlify or GitHub pages. I had success initially deploying with GitHub pages, though my site resulted being "Not Secure" on Chrome. I made another attempt on setting up my domain with Namecheap and Netlify. Starting with Namecheap to configure the DNS settings > Manage. Under Nameservers category, I had to update from Namecheap Basic DNS to Custom DNS.
Reroute to my Netlify Domain Settings real quick to add my custom domain.
The next step would be to select Set Up Netlify DNS. I would need to acquire a list of Nameservers from Netlify and propagate on Namecheap.
Copy all of Netlify's DNS servers to Namecheap Nameservers, and click the green check button to save this setting.
While I was not able to figure out the SSL/TLS certificate with GitHub pages, I learned Netlify will provision Let's Encrypt certificate automatically once the DNS configuration on the custom domain pointing to Netlify's servers. Namecheap suggests revisiting your site in 24 - 48 hours once Netlify's DNS fully propagated.
It's official. Now I have a personal site! 💥
Check out https://fentybit.me/!
Top comments (60)
I like the design. It is clean and minimal.
The YouTube video's on your projects page are a really smart way to show what you've built.
I'm currently working on my portfolio v2 and you've given me some great inspiration.
Good luck for the remainder of your bootcamp 😁
Thanks so much Peter!
Good luck on your portfolio. I hope to see it soon on dev.to. 😀
Really cool personal site! The design is seriously sleek.
Just wanted to note that there's another DEV-like site out there called CodeNewbie that's geared toward new devs, but also built and run by DEV (dev.to).
This seems like a post that would fit really well on CodeNewbie too if you'd be down to join up and share it there! But regardless, thanks for sharing this awesome post right here on DEV. 🙂
Codenewbie has some good podcasts
I will check out the link you sent!
I love exploring other communities out there. Thank you so much Michael. 🤓
Really love the sleek design. But you should keep an eye out for the contact form, the input validation logic is missing (anyone can submit an empty form).
Checkout my portfolio at: tapajyoti-bose.vercel.app/ (shameless self-promotion 😛)
Ps: best of luck for the remaining months at the bootcamp
I fully agree with you. I have been meaning to go back, and insert .js to fix this validation logic. Is that what you did to yours?
I'm using react, the validation is handled on form submit
You can made your portfolio dynamic, something i did, was make a configuration dashboard on my portfolio, i can access it through a simple authentication, and in that side, get my repositories through the GitHub api and choose what i wanna show on the client.
great work great that you share it, yesterday I was just visiting the youtube channel of traversy media and I learned how the contact form in netlify is made very simple, thinking about the domain and all this that is quite complicated for not knowing about the subject . So I designed my website buy domain namecheap upload it to netlify would be great thank you very much for sharing I like it
Good luck! I think filling up the content is actually most time consuming, and deploying is a matter of browsing through YT and dev.to blogs. 😀
Thank you so much for this. I went to pagespeed insight, and it was suggested my pics were too high res/big size. I reduced to 25-30% from original size, and it appears to save at least 1 second when loading the site. I learned something new today, thank you again.
Amazing website. Have you subscribed to pixelarity or did you take inspiration from them and designed on your own?
Thank you Navaneeth. I purchased Pixelarity template in the interest of time. I hope to create my site from scratch hopefully in the next few months.
How are you going to view the information received through the contact form? are you going to keep looking in the database regularly? Or do you have some interface for that?. Just curious 😄
Check out Formspree.
The API link sends it out directly to your private email without exposing it on HTML view source.
Oh great
nice!
I can’t believe how easy it is to do a contact form on Netlify. I had a form that posted to an AWS lambda function 🙈 before I knew about it
I haven't tried AWS lambda function, good to know. ☺️
Well the great thing with Netlify is that you don't need to 😎 you can add form submissions without a backend.
I see rotating buttons …
Netlify is indeed nice for static websites: drag and drop deployment, automated builds, etc.
Netlify CDN has IPv6, while GitHub doesn't.
Let me know if I should try anything else other than Netlify, love trying something new.
Vercel (vercel.com/), by the creators of Next.js. Though honestly it's prettty similar to Netlify so you might not really learn that many new things
Simple and clean 👍 (PS: there is a 404 error with your favicon)
Thank you so much for pointing this out!
I revised my favicon src link, and should fix it. ☺️