Jordan's Search Journey Blog's Search Journey Blog Post #8

Website is Live

As mentioned in a previous post, I am working on a website to act as an electronic business card of sorts.

My website can be found here https://www.sleepycreekcapital.com

Please gander through it and provide as much critical feedback as possible. I believe it could definitely use more improvement. Let me know in the comments or via email, redacted

Also, I am considering adding a video testimonial page. The section will have a few short videos from people I have either worked for or worked for me. The hopeful goal is: They say what I am like to work with, my character, etc. What do you think of that idea? Let me know in the comments or via email, redacted

The nuts and bolts of the site was made

For those curious about the nuts and bolts of making the website. First I had to find the right hosting service for this minimalistic website was somewhat challenging. I considered them by 3 basic metrics:

Affordable Reliable Easy to Use to Build the Site Affordable is easy as there are 100’s of web hosts that offer superb introductory offers at around $2/month for a shared hosting site. Most also were easy to find how much they would cost after the first year, and that ranged wildly from ~$8/month to ~$40/month. Also, many included the domain name purchase for the first year, which then for renewal ranged from ~$15/year to $30/year. I don’t intend to need this site in a year, so this was less of a consideration.

Reliability was a little more difficult, while most promise 99.9% reliability, reading through reviews offers a different perspective. For example, Blue Host has a ton of reviews about people losing their site for days a month. Also, when it came to email delivery from the domain name, many had reviews that their email would always end up in the spam filters. I considered smaller companies such as the one referred to by a friend, WebHostingPad, and those that came with outside perks such as Blue Host through the Tom Woods Show. Ultimately, I chose one of the big players, 1 and 1, because it came with Google Workspace, and for $2/month.

What they offer for $24/year for the first year

Google Workspace Domain name Website builder Shared web hosting
I am not a fan of Google, but I selected this so that I could use Gmail with my email address redacted and have my email hopefully not get stuck in the spam filters. The website design process was a bit finicky, but I think the results look decent. I wanted some images in the background that sort of fit with the name of the company and focus, so I found a few free for commercial use at Pixabay.
The cool thing about Pixabay is it is set up to allow you to donate to the photographers of the images directly. I threw a few dollars to each, and they get more than they would licensing out to Getty Images, so a win-win.