How I built My Website in Four Months in 2024

I know, the title is a little discouraging, but hear me our. I swear, this is worth your read. You are probably researching on creating websites in Kenya, and before you think of website development companies in Kenya lend me your 5 minutes.

See, I have been creating websites from 2018 when I first learnt the craft. I branded myself as Dawn Technologies, then rebranded to Digital Bridge and Data, and finally Entirety Solutions. The reason for the rebrands demands a separate article and hopefully I will be able to get to it in time but first, let us see why it took me about four months to develop my own website and why you can do it in less time even with no technical background. (Yes, another no code web development article)

To date, I have designed and developed more than 15 websites and I have to admit. A web developer is his worst client. Blair Enns and David C  Baker agree with me. You can check out their podcast, 2 Bobs Podcast on Spotify.

In January 2024, I finished revamping the Kanduyi Festival website after their annual cycling races in December 2023. This gave me lots of free time and I decided to ‘finally’ finish my website (entirety.africa). I had already paid for a domain name and hosting service from Truehost Kenya since I use them for a number of clients’ websites. I paid Ksh. 4,300 for the domain and hosting.

Having a domain name and hosting, I had to decide if I was going to code the website from scratch or if I’d use no code tools. I learned towards no code tools because I needed to integrate a blog to the website and using a CMS (content management system) like WordPress makes managing the website and the blog seamless. I am a one man team, save for the times when I land projects and I need freelancers. As a result I wanted something that would be easy to manage in between working on client projects, and would cost me nothing to update/maintain.

The Design

For client projects, the design process is intense and at the end we normally have wireframes, which is a skeleton showing where different elements would be positioned on the website. Since I was working on a zero-ish budget, I sketched in my notebook how I wanted the website to look like. Later on I realized this exercise was in vain since using WordPress meant I had to sacrifice some customization options. Still, it helped me gain clarity over what I was setting out to do.

Copywriting & Graphics

With the design sorted, the next thing in line was figuring out copywriting (Copywriting is one of the most critical elements of any and all forms of marketing and advertising) and the graphics. I have handled copywriting assignments for client projects before, but this was different because I did not create a brief for myself. I wrote the website copy in a word document, and used generative AI to refine the text. You can use ChatGPT by CopyAI has become a favorite, even though it has a limit on the number of words you can generate in a month, unless you pay a monthly subscription.

For images, I designed some of the graphics myself using Photoshop, especially content for the Projects page. I also downloaded images from Pexels, which is a great repository of copyright free images. If you do not have a graphics design background and Photoshop looks intimidating, you can use Canva instead. It gives you decent graphics even though you may be limited in some aspects.

My website has only six web pages, but it took ages to finish them. I have learnt that for personal projects, done is better than perfect. Chasing perfection had me changing website themes over and over again just because I felt something was not ‘great’ I uploaded the site after working on the site for two months, even though it was half baked. This was intentional. It gave me the pressure to put more effort into completing the project since people could already access my website.

I built my website slowly, choosing to finish one page before moving on to the next. It created the homepage first since it is my landing page, then the contact page came next. After the contact page, I decided to work on the blogposts page, because I had some articles I had written in December 2023 and wanted to publish them as soon as possible. these articles formed the series of Twitter (X) threads I published (you can view the thread here). The Services, About Us and Projects pages came next. I probably spend over one month on the projects page alone because of how my WordPress theme (PHLOX) was set up

WordPress

This CMS packs a punch no doubt! You can manage both your landing page and blog on one platform, one dashboard and for me, this means I get fewer headaches. Read about landing pages and blogs here. And hey, it is 2024.  You can use WordPress for anything, Including e-commerce platforms. WordPress itself is free, but you may have to pay for some themes and plugins, depending on what you want your website to do. It is also easy to link your wordpress website with CRM tools to streamline your lead conversion process.

Lessons Learnt

• Time management is important when you are working on your own website. You are only answerable to yourself and if are not careful you will end up never finishing the project
• Perfect is an illusion. There is no perfect website, we have great ones and others not so great. Instead of focusing on perfection, just finish the project and improve the site gradually.
• Budget: You can create a website in Kenya for zero shillings, excluding the cost of acquiring a domain name and a hosting plan. But you will pay for it in hours of learning so as to know how to fully customize your website.
• Optimization. Many users will be viewing your website on mobile devices. This means that your website should be optimized for mobile devices and your content should appear great across multiple devices.

Well, that I how I developed my website    in close to four months, which is way too long for such simple websites. I hope you learnt a thing or two. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in the comments below and I will be happy to respond to it. See you in the next one.