Creating a website is something that turned out to be both easier and more complicated than I expected. After I had the idea for Time Travel Guides, I read a lot of advice online about web design, hosting options, and how to make your own website. I encountered lots of regulations (like the GDPR) and advice on issues that I hadn’t thought to consider (wordpress.com vs wordpress.org).
Every question that I wanted to ask had already been answered somewhere online and there were plenty of guides and tools to help set up a website. However, the huge number of decisions that needed to be made and all of options for each choice were somewhat overwhelming. As someone who grew up in one of the last pre-digital generations in the UK (in a very rural area in the 1980s), technology isn’t something that always comes naturally to me.
Plans for the TTGs Website
Since there were so many possibilities for the website, I decided to go back to pen and paper and simply to sketch out what I wanted to create. I drew the way I wanted the main pages to look and connected everything with lines to think about which parts needed to be linked together.
The main part of the website will be the historical data. I want to bring together all of the interesting facts and resources I have encountered and share them in a new way, with:
- maps where you can explore different places and times
- stories that you can follow on the maps to experience local history where it happened
Setting Up the Website
Even after I learned about the options and thought about what I wanted to include on the website, it took quite a lot of time to set everything up. I ended up using WordPress because there was so much advice for beginners online. Another advantage is that there are many different themes for WordPress that can instantly create sites with a particular look. I chose the Material Design theme as it was most similar to the plans I had drawn. The theme is also accessibility-ready and should work across different devices.
Building a website can be a simple process thanks to all the tools that are available, but it still takes a lot of thought and time to get everything organised. With WordPress, you can easily add different types of blocks (such as images or paragraphs like this one) and arrange them on the page. Every element of the website from colours to the shape of the corners on boxes has to be chosen and every little detail can be carefully customised. The sketches I created made the process easier as I knew what I was looking for and just had to find the most similar options.
The basic look and layout of the TTGs website has been completed, but there is still a lot of content to add. The next steps will be to add the maps and historical data for the first location and to make sure they are easy and enjoyable to use – these will be the main parts of the TTGs website.
