In 2016, I decided that along with taking courses at RISD and online trainings at Lynda.com, the most effective way to learn and understand the fundamentals of front-end web development would be to build a website from scratch (No WordPress, No Wix etc.). Being a musician, I decided to create a website that focuses on my music background and interests. Like my other freelance projects, I'm always looking to improve my design and front-end development skills, but building this website helped me learn quite a bit about HTML, CSS, JavaScript, SEO, responsive web design, and overall web architecture of a website.
For inspiration for creating this website, I spent a lot of time reviewing and testing band and musician website templates on websites such as ThemeForest.net, BandZoogle.com, and Colorlib.com, as well as watching YouTube videos on UI/UX design and front-end development. I made a list of my favorite band and musician websites (which I still update often), and this process is ongoing since I often like to redesign and update my code on this website.
First, in order to help myself understand how many web pages would be involved in building this website, I created a sitemap that represented the main navigation. I also created low-fidelity wireframes to map out the website's structure and page layouts for both mobile and desktop.
Design element highlights on the website include using the Google Fonts API to add web fonts, creating a mobile responsive menu, creating complex components such an HTML5 audio player, a masonry layout for the image gallery, and creating a PHP contact form in order to send notification emails to an email address once the form has been submitted.
Once the website was ready to launch, I purchased a domain and a web hosting plan with GoDaddy.com and uploaded all of the web pages and assets to the file manager. I also purchased a website security plan and set up a custom email address. I also had an SSL certificate installed, and updated my .htaccess file in order to redirect visitors to the secured (HTTPS) version of my website.
*This domain is no longer active. I created a repository and set up a domain on GitHub.
