I often think of web developers and their websites like mechanics and their cars, or chefs and their home-cooking habits – when you spend a lot of time building web applications as part of your dayjob, it’s easy to neglect your own online presence. Many developers opt for a GitHub Pages site or a very simple CV-style one-pager.
I decided that it was about time I reinstated my own website for a few reasons:
- I haven’t had a real personal home online since around 2012, when I was but a young green junior with a lot more ambition than practical knowledge;
- Having a place to write has a few potential benefits: it’s therapeutic to get your thoughts out sometimes, it’s nice to be able to reflect on past learning experiences and see how far you’ve come, and just maybe, on the off chance, someone else will find my inane babble useful too;
- Whilst I love project work, one of my favourite aspects of this career is the fact that it moves so fast, there is always something new to learn – and what better place to experiment with new technologies than my own site, where the only person irked by any downtime is myself?
So with that in mind, I set myself a few goals for this self-initiated mini-project.
Firstly, I should use some technology that’s new to me.
Having spent the last few years of my development career primarily focused on backend technologies like Laravel, I felt it would be good to get my head stuck into the fast-paced world that is the current javascript ecosystem.
Of course I’m no stranger to JS by any means (remember Mootools, anyone?), but I’m definitely not as up-to-date with that side of the web as I’d like to be. There’s a lot of really cool stuff going on with NextJS at the moment, so that seemed like a great place to start.
Secondly, I’d like to manage content through a familiar interface.
I know, you hate WordPress. It’s almost like a badge of honour for serious web developers to hate WordPress. I totally understand the multitude of reasons – we’ve all experienced client sites with more plugins installed than should ever be considered reasonable, and the fact that the WP Foundation is led by a borderline sociopath doesn’t really give it any good publicity.
The fact of the matter is though – as a content management system, it’s actually pretty damn good.
I played with Sanity.io for a day or two on a side project six months or so ago, and whilst I totally appreciate how powerful it is as a content management system, for a lot of use cases (this one firmly included) it’s just a sledgehammer to crack a walnut. I need posts, I need pages, I need taxonomies, and that’s pretty much it. WordPress gives me all of that all within the “famous” 5 minute install.
Thirdly, can I do this at a reasonably professional level for no cost at all?
I just want to preface this by saying it’s not because I’m tight. Far from it – I’m actually terribly frivolous with money. I wanted to try and do this for free because, well… why not? Can a web developer in 2025 build a CMS-powered, well-hosted, extensible, fast and performant website on the same budget as those spinning up a static page on GitHub Pages?
As it turns out, the answer is: “yes!” Pretty easily in fact. This site is up and running, with a NextJS frontend and a WordPress backend, for the total budget of £0.
I’d tell you how I did it right now, but then I wouldn’t have much to write about in my next blog post, so you’ll just have to wait and see.
I know, what a cliffhanger!