When I started building websites, I thought the hard part would be learning how to code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
HTML, CSS, PHP, maybe some JavaScript. Learn enough of those and I figured I’d be able to make whatever website I wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was very wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The code is only one part of it. There are domains, hosting, DNS, databases, WordPress, servers, SSL, design, plugins, permissions, configuration files and a whole collection of things I didn’t even know existed when I started.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I learned about domains fairly quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Buying one is easy. Actually getting everything connected is where things get interesting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can have your website ready, your domain ready, your hosting ready, and still end up staring at a screen wondering why the thing isn’t working. Then you start learning about nameservers and DNS records and discover that a website can fail because of something you had never even heard of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve had to ask questions about domains too, including whether a domain like 8thpc.in could legally be used for a website about the 8th Pay Commission.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That was another thing I didn’t expect. Building a website sometimes means finding out about things that have nothing to do with writing code.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Hosting is another one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to think hosting basically meant paying someone to keep your website online.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then came AWS.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Lightsail. EC2. Credits. Servers. Resources. Bills.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At one point I was trying to understand why EC2 was consuming credits when I was only using Lightsail. That was a particularly good reminder that knowing what service you are using and knowing what is happening behind the scenes are two different things.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I also learned that a database is not just something you hear about in programming tutorials and then forget.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A website can depend on a database without the person looking at the website having any idea that it is there. Then something stops working and suddenly you are looking at database connections, credentials and configuration files.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
WordPress made some of this easier and some of it more confusing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is great when you want to get something running without building everything yourself. But once something goes wrong, you can end up wondering whether the problem is WordPress, the theme, a plugin, PHP, the database, the hosting or something you changed three days ago and completely forgot about.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PHP is another one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When it works, I don’t think about it much. When it doesn’t, I suddenly care very deeply about PHP.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then there is design.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I used to think making a website look good would mostly be about choosing a nice background and putting things in the right places.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It isn’t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You start noticing spacing, fonts, buttons, mobile layouts, images, section sizes and all the little things that make a website feel either pleasant or slightly broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something can work perfectly and still look terrible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve also learned that screenshots can be surprisingly useful. Sometimes you just want to see what a website actually looks like without opening it and clicking through everything. I’ve even had to look for free websites that can take screenshots of other websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
These are not things I imagined I would be thinking about when I first started learning to build websites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
AI has changed the process too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I use it to help me write code, understand errors, figure out unfamiliar things and think through problems. It saves me a lot of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It can also give me something that looks completely reasonable and still doesn’t work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That part is important.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Getting code from AI is easy. Getting the code to work with your actual website, hosting setup, files and everything else around it is another matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then there is debugging.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This might be the biggest thing I know now that I didn’t know before.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Some problems are obvious. Others are ridiculous.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You can spend hours looking through code, checking settings, changing things, undoing those changes and trying to figure out what went wrong.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then you find the problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One missing character.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
One file in the wrong place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Something you were sure you had already checked.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And you just sit there wondering how something so small managed to waste so much of your time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve asked a lot of questions while building things. Technical ones mostly, but also about hosting, about domains, about whether something was even possible or legal. A few were probably things I should have already known.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I don’t think that matters much anymore.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I’ve realised that asking is often faster than pretending I know.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The more I build, the more I notice how much of it is simply figuring things out as I go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes I know exactly what I’m doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Sometimes I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And sometimes I spend two hours fixing something that should have taken five minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That last part, unfortunately, seems to be one of the things I know now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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