Deploying your portfolio website without being a sound developer using a free domain; a walk-through solution
As a developer or data scientist or even someone seeking to create an online presence, one of the first calling points is to create your personal website otherwise known as a portfolio to showcase your work and other things that can make anybody to contact you for business or for any company to hire you.
But the problem with so many people is how to get started. While some people who are web developers can actually write some codes in HTML, CSS, and JAVASCRIPT to get the website done in their local machine, the problem is usually with getting free hosting and domain. Others don’t even have any background in web development, yet needs a personal website. If you are one of them, then this article is for you.
I will walk you through how you can get a static website for yourself without having to start coding from the beginning. I will assume the following about you:
You can google
You have GitHub account, if no, click here to register.
You can use Gitbash a bit (it is necessary to be able to make changes to your website have you have published it.)
Now let’s start a real business. The first business is to get a website we want to build. We can either use one of the static websites generators (like Gatsby JS) or download a free template online (like w3layout template) or fork a GitHub repository. If you are comfortable with Gatsby JS or w3layout please do or fork a repository here to get your website. Check the image below for direction.
Great. You have now gotten a website template to work with. The next is to deploy the site and get a free domain name. We have many options that we can use to deploy our website. One is Heroku / Netlify and the other is Github. While Heroku requires additional setup, Github doesn’t, for this reason, we would be deploying our website with Github. So go back to the repository we forked earlier, click on setting.
Then scroll then to change your source to master. By doing this your website is live. Scroll down to see a blank custom name box. That is where we are going to put our domain name after getting it from freenom. After this, your site will be live with your chosen domain name.
It is time to get a free domain:
You need to understand that we have different Top Level Domains, TLD (.com, .xyz, tk, .me, ml, etc). So for our case, since it is a personal website and free domain, I will recommend .tk. Freenom provides a year free domain for some TLD. So, you will need to sign up here. Type the name you want. A unique one! Once it's available, click on the domain to change it to 12 months free domain instead of the default three months.
Go to the footer/header section of the website, click on DNS management from the services dropdown menu then ensure that you have the same thing as mine as shown below:
Once you are done. We will now go back to GitHub to input the name (e.g abideen305.tk) in the custom name I showed you before when we deployed our website. Click save. Test your domain from your web browser if any error it’s from your freenom / DNS setting. Go back to it to ensure you have the same thing as mine.
However, we have a challenge. The website with your domain name is a duplication of mine. You need to make some changes to your website. If you are a developer head to your favorite IDE and push your changes using Gitbash. If you’re not, I will publish a step by step method to edit the code later. Also if you already have a static website. Just follow how to deploy with GitHub and get a free domain. That’s all you need.
Thank you. Please if you find it useful, kindly clap and share it with others to benefit them. You can follow me on medium for more resources. Lastly don’t forget to hook with me on social media handles below:
Email: abideenmuhammed2018@gmail.com
