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This blog has so far been very finance/passive income focused, but I think a large part of personal growth and success is learning and growing your skill-sets. Overtime I’ll post as I work on home projects and things that I learn to do, but it’s winter and I’m mostly stuck inside. The most recent thing I’ve been building and learning how to create is this website.
Mini Thoughts has been an idea in my head since I discovered Mr. Money Mustache in 2016. I bought my domain from Google Domains for $12/year. Even after working in IT for years at that point, I didn’t really process that owning the domain was not having a place to host a website. Still I wanted to focus on writing short form conversational content as I journeyed to FIRE (Financial Independence Retire Early).
Life interrupted. We had multiple moves and three kids, and I love that they took up the time I had to focus on making a website. However, I knew that I wanted to keep my domain because someday I would learn how to make a website. In 2024 Google Domains was migrated to Squarespace, which is how I’m using them now. Squarespace has maintained the same price Google Domains did at $12/year. Total Spent $108 with renewal coming up this year. Now I just needed a host.
Finding a Home
The first thing I looked into was how I wanted to manage and create my site. Word Press seemed to be the number #1 recommended solution for having complete control over your own website. I chose the steeper learning curve of WordPress because it offers me the long-term flexibility to create this journey on my terms. That led me to Bluehost. They are a low cost WordPress hosting platform. The 1 year price for hosting was $64.37. That’s about $5.36/month. Now if you use an affiliate link, like the one below, the introductory price is $1.99/month. Which is a crazy difference.
Building the Site
I found the WordPress admin site pretty simple to navigate. It utilizes plugins to automate certain things and create standardized page layouts without needing to create Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) for the entire site. It’s very open and and plug and play.
So far I’ve learned that ” / ” commands will let you select different things, like pictures, buttons, and columns without having to click on each new “type”. Built in apps will tell you if the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is green or red based on the content you create.
It took me awhile to figure out that a newsletter sign up was different than a email sign up, but once that solution was resolved my new post emails started to successfully arrive.
I also recently learned how to set a post to publish in advance, but the trick that wordpress doesn’t tell you is that it won’t actually publish on the schedule unless the site is being viewed actively at the time it’s set to publish. Which has ended up requiring me to manually post anyway. Until traffic picks up enough to trigger automation, I just have to publish manually.
It’s interesting as well that I’ve learned almost everything related to promoting a website wants to charge you money. Subscriptions everywhere, mailing lists, SEO boosts, boosted content shares. It’s a crazy money making world out there.
Finally, here’s to hoping that someday the blog about snowballing investments and self growth with grow into it’s own investment, but if it does or doesn’t I still learned how to do something new.
~~Miniwing~~