Developing My First Official Website on WordPress

Welcome to my first official website, The CAM Network.

I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to create my own website through WordPress and CPanel, powered by CarlSites. I strongly encourage all Carleton students to consider setting up their own site through CarlSites, as it is provided free of charge to all Carleton students. I even fell into the rabbit hole of spending a couple of hours coming up with and designing a name and a logo for my new website; the name is still a work in progress, but for now, I think it will suffice.

As of right now, I don’t have a clear plan for what I want to bring to my website, which is why I wanted to keep the name of it kind of vague to keep myself open to a bunch of different possibilities. One potential idea I have is to add any coding projects I might do in the future to this website, as it would be a great place to store them and make them accessible to the public.

There are a multitude of benefits that come with setting up your own website, but I think the biggest benefit, in my opinion, is the customizability. There are so many different ways to build and set up a website in order to make it yours. While I was poking around some fellow students’ sites what stood out to me was how different each one was, despite all of us building them from the same starting point. I am very excited with how my own website looks, and I look forward to being able to add even more to it and customize it accordingly.

One glaring issue that I noticed during this process was how much was already provided to me. For instance, if I weren’t a Carleton student, some of the access I have to creating and building my website would not be granted to me without having to pay. Now, after some digging on WordPress’ website, I discovered that the domains that were purchasable were only $10-20 a year; however, that was just a baseline search, and additional costs could come with having to protect and maintain your website once you create it.