Introduction
WordPress provides a powerful platform for people to publish content, including personal blogs and portfolio sites. This week, I created a personal website using WordPress hosted on the Carleton cPanel, and I want to share a little bit about my experience with this. I worked as a Digital Scholarship Intern at Carleton over my sophomore year, so I already had a bit of familiarity with the concept of setting up cPanel and installing WordPress, and this part of the process went fairly smoothly. When it came to creating content on the newly created site, however, I found it a little bit more challenging to navigate. I currently have a personal/portfolio website that I created using Hugo, and is hosted on GitHub Pages, so I am a lot more used to the simple approach taken by static site generators. To start off, I switched my site theme to The Minimal Blogger, as I appreciate the minimalist aesthetic that it brings. I also deleted all default content/pages, opting to manually create only two pages: the home page, which is what visitors see by default when landing on my site, and the about page, which provides a small paragraph about me. I have included a screenshot of my about page below.
Custom CSS in WordPress
When creating my site, I included a small piece of CSS code to change the font that I used for my about paragraph, opting for different font that cannot be chosen from the font selector. I found this process surprisingly easy – all I had to do was navigate to the Styles Editor, select, the three dots, and click the button labeled “Additional CSS.” Specifically, I included:
.about-content {
font-family: 'Cascadia Code';
font-size: 14px;
}This switches the font to Cascadia Code, a monospace programming font by Microsoft, which is one of my favorite fonts.
Why Custom Website are a Powerful Tool
Custom websites such as the one that I created can be a powerful tool to allow people to express themselves, beyond the limits of what social media platforms can provide. They allow the creation of multimedia content, including images, videos, and text content integrated into one place, providing a more powerful medium for creation. Additionally, as social media companies increasingly try to maximize the profit off their user base, and promote often divisive content, self-hosted website provide a way to escape the walled garden created by many social media platforms, and promote a more grass roots form of expression seperate from the highly curated social media feeds of the present day.
Drawbacks of Hosting a Custom Website
While certainly very powerful, custom sites on platforms such as WordPress definitely come with some disadvantages to traditional forms of social media. First of all, it can be extremely hard to build a platform or audience based solely off of a blog website, which lacks the automatic social aspect of social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even LinkedIn. This pushes the job of drawing an audience to the content creator, through promoting their website such as with SEO. Additionally, content moderation becomes another challenge that is pushed onto the content creators. While plugins exist, such as Akismet, the spam filtering plugin I activated on my personal site, they often cost money and require more manual oversight than what common social media platforms require. Finally, the technical hurdle to familiarizing yourself with the hosting process is higher than that of social media platforms, which can also prevent a barrier to users.
Conclusion
Custom hosted websites, such mine that I have linked above, can provide a powerful way for content creators and digital humanists to express themselves. However, hosting a website comes with its drawbacks, as they require more manual oversight and management. As social media increasingly becomes hyper curated and divisive, I think that self-hosted websites will increase in popularity as a form of personal expression.
