It was a random and normal day and my mother wanted a website for her business. Since I was already into coding I thought, making websites would be a good skill to learn, but I was already working on bash, so this was out of my list. My father made the website for my mum through hugo. I was always hanging around my father when he was making the website and I found it interesting. Once I finished learning the basics of bash I decided to make a website for myself to blog. Then I started making my website.

In the beginning I was really confused. It was like watching Predestination (an awesome Ethan Hawke movie)! I couldn’t put together what I was doing. Well anyway I still followed what my father was telling me and did what was asked to do. The first step I took was thinking of a name and making a logo. I really like corners and tiny places. I just like going there and chilling, so I picked Shikha’s Nook for the name. It took me a day to come up with this. The next day I made the logo. It was pretty easy to make the logo because I had already pictured it in my head the day before.

I started working on the basic content like about me and my first blog post. That took a few days. My father and I were talking about what my first blog post could be and we slowly drifted in our conversation to books of different authors, and then the book shelf. We were talking about cleaning it and giving away all the books we don’t need to Blossoms and getting new books. then it suddenly flashed to me… I could write a blog post on our bookshelf! So I started working on that. Once my basic content was done I got some inputs and did some editing. A day later me and my father started discussing all the steps we need to follow and what to do. Here’s an image of that -

So before I did all of this I had to learn how to use the git commands and understand what it does. So that took about 1 week but, it felt like years! How many ever times my father told me, and I did it, I just wouldn’t get it. I always forgot. As an odissi dancer, I have a lot of things to remember and I am used to remembering yet, this was pretty confusing at first. I always missed the git part for git commands like git push or git commit.But this just wouldn’t go into my head. It was pretty frustrating then. Well anyway my father was there to guide me when I was stuck so we moved on.

I followed the steps and downloaded hugo, Then I picked a theme and downloaded it. I installed atom (an editor) for working on content and configuration files. And later I figured there was a problem with the theme. So I tried downloading another theme. But it wouldn’t download. Finally I picked a theme called stack, it was pretty fast. I just picked it randomly and it turned out to be good!

After I did all that I was really confused for a few days, and then I finally made a clear plan and set a target. Other important things I did were making a github account, a render account and getting my domain name. Then I created a new project on github and cloned it to my computer. Then I linked my github repo to my render account. After that I just learnt a few more commands and pushed my finished site to github. Render pulled it from there and put it online. Now you might not get all of this and unless you do it you may not get it. Like how it was when my father wrote down all the steps in the beginning but, that just made me even more confused. I did not get it till I did it.

So, finally, I made my website!!! Even though it had taken one extra week from the target day I still finished it before 2021! Right now when I look back at the journey it feels like it was all really difficult. But it was all setting up the base for every website I was going to make going forward. Like I don’t have to install hugo or git again, and I have learnt many things on the way.

So this is the beginning of my journey in making websites.