Creation of this blog.

Behind the Scenes: How This Portfolio Was Built

This post will be all about how this blog was created, what I used and what I learned.

Hosting

As a student, I have access to the Academic Software platform, where you can find all kinds of software for free, including Combell web hosting. I picked a free domain and got started.

Content Management System (CMS)

When setting up the domain, I also had to choose between Linux web hosting or WordPress hosting. It wasn’t an easy choice. With regular web hosting, you have complete freedom, but you also have to build everything from scratch. And with WordPress hosting, you can quickly create a nice-looking website without losing much time on coding.

I wanted to focus on my content rather than spend hours on styling and code, and because I used WordPress in the past for an international project in Valencia (feel free to check it out 😉 https://howestti2025valencia.wordpress.com/), I chose WordPress as my CMS.

Theme

I wanted a theme that looked good but wasn’t a pain to figure out. So I did some research. I had some choice stress because of all the options. But then I stumbled across Blocksy. It gave me a solid foundation to build on and looked great out of the box, so my decision was made quickly.

Final thoughts and what I learned

I quickly realized that I could have made it easier for myself in the past when working with WordPress. Instead of creating each blog post as a separate page and then linking a block to the post on my main page, I now know that WordPress posts exist. Which makes it so much easier 😅.

I didn’t know that even WordPress still has a learning curve. I struggled a bit with the theme customizer and just wanted to code it sometimes. But I made it work. Next time I build something in WordPress, I would like to use a Full Site Editing (FSE) theme that completely eliminates the customizer. Because everything then happens in the editor. The jumping back and forth felt quite annoying at times.

I was happy to have learned so much about (even though it is just WordPress) and will surely use it in the future!