Hi everyone, I've been a member of this community for a while and love all the helpful posts, tutorials and articles. The truth is, I'm not a web developer but rather old school in desktop programming [gulp] and in a way new(er) school becoming an Android developer.
I have a website where I primarily want to showcase my Android apps, and maybe add some other content later. However for the past almost 2 years it's just parked and has not had any content added. The site host has wordpress and some other sitebuilder as tools that can generate a website, but I would love to learn how to create my own website.
Question 1: can I simply remove all the files in cpanel hosted on the site under public_html and replace it with my own - right now I don't even know which are remaining from wordpress and which are remaining from the sitebuilder?
Question 2: how do I build my own website - I want to learn. I managed something 20y ago as a volunteer for some organization and while it was passable then, I doubt flashing text and comic sans would cut it today ;)
Thanks
Top comments (1)
For cPanel specifically - yes, you can probably remove everything in public_html and replace it with your own website files - if you have more than one domain in your account (or subdomains) those probably have a single folder each - you'll want to make sure you're only changing the files that belong to the site you mean to change - if you have just one domain associated with the cpanel account there's not very much risk in getting that wrong. If you're at all in doubt, there should be a backup to zip option that will give you an archive of your account before you take any drastic measures.
Secondly, for cPanel, most hosts will allow running php and mysql (perfectly suitable for wordpress, the site builder, and a number of other popular systems), so if you find a technology other than that like node.js or python's django or ruby on rails and wanted to build the site with that, you'll probably run into some complications with your host.
If you're writing plain html + css + javascript - any webserver will work fine, they're all very good at taking requests for files and giving the static files back, cPanel's system is no exception. If you are building a database backed web application, instead of a website, you might have to talk to your host, choose a technology compatible with their system, or find a new host like a low cost vps if you wanted to work in something other than what they can support. For a portfolio of your apps and related work, especially if the business end of downloads and payment is handled by the platform, you might not need a database or any "backend" code.
Wordpress is not a bad choice for designing a site - whether you ultimately use it to build the final product, there's a lot of tooling and a healthy community around themes, plugins, creating pages, etc, and most of them will include the right kind of media queries so mobile and desktop users get satisfying experiences. I've used wordpress to fill out the content and layout of the page, and transformed it to static html afterward using wget or other site mirroring tools.
Otherwise, copying other people's designs is still a great place to start, especially getting a sense for what you want things to look like, see how it's being done, and trying to recreate it yourself. "Inspect element" in the browser gives you a lot of powerful tooling, and you can even edit the page content from the inspector (and view it in the browser) to experiment a little. The biggest "design" decision you might want to hash out before getting too far into the work is to decide how you want to show the portfolio, is it an index list of titles, with one page per app, a set of preview tiles that expand to show more detail, a carousel of app preview images (linking to the app store?). The biggest question to keep in the back of your mind should be "what will I need to do to add another app title to this site", and CMS systems are built to solve that problem for you (the cost of that flexibility is that they ask the database for information about what they're going to display when the user requests the page, and build html from the database content, which is slower than returning a pre-rendered file on disk).
The basic technology idea that browsers send http requests to webservers, webservers send html and other resources to browsers, browsers then render the content for the user hasn't changed much in 20 years, even if the consensus on rainbow colored Comic Sans header text may have.