For about the last two week, I have worked on my WordPress website; I went from having slim to no idea about how WordPress operates to now having this badass website fully compatible with @Steempress and professional looking at all levels.

Disclaimer: Keep in mind that all these services are for free and have their limitations and this whole thing is highly experimental. If you want to build a serious and professional website, I advise you to invest some money and get something premium and well trusted.

I always liked the idea of building websites and creating something beautiful that more people can relate to and, at the surface is more than just zeros and ones but, so far, I never finished building a site since my programming skills are pretty limited. Even so, after finding out about Steempress, I had that urge and desire to build a website once again, and this time I managed to pull it off.

_{Photo by William White on Unsplash}

So, about two weeks ago, I started researching and learning more about this whole Wordpress thing but, I only had in mind the idea of a website in the beginning. I didn’t know how I wanted my website to look entirely, but I knew that I wanted it to be simple and beautiful. For me, a simple but still beautiful design is the holy grail, and that’s what I was trying to accomplish.

Long before thinking of creating a website for myself, I wanted to build one with @macchiata for our still highly delayed and underdevelopment project, @steemchronicles, with a pro host, sick ass custom domain, and premium templates. But, I decided to try and get something that’s free for me especially that I don’t own any PayPal, active online payments account, or running debit cards so, buying stuff online is a complete hassle.

_{Photo by Fabian Grohs on Unsplash}

In this post I will focus on getting a free host and custom domain and, as I said, when I started I had slim to no knowledge about this whole space so, maybe this post might help a few people.

Host and Domain

Any website needs a base, you need to build it upon something, and for that, you need a host and a domain. You could build a basic WordPress website with their free plan, but that would not be compatible with @Steempress because Steempress is a plugin and the free plan doesn’t allow you to install plugins so, this option is very limited and impractical.

In that case, if you want something free but still fully working, you can always go with a free host that also gives you a subdomain, there are plenty out there and some even on the blockchain too, like @vornix but, then, you wouldn’t have a custom domain. When I started, I considered that option too but, I am a dude that likes beauty, and a subdomain looks ugly as fuck, so I kept on searching to see if there’s a better option.

_{Photo by Le Buzz on Unsplash}

Because I already knew that there were some free hosts on the market the first thing I did was looking for free custom domain options even if I wasn’t expecting to find much. To my surprise, I stumbled upon freenom.com, and they give you the option to choose between 5 custom domains for free but, as any free service, they have their catches. If you want to build something more serious, this is not the best option for you but, for blogging on WordPress and Steem, it might get the job done. I will, for now, stick to this domain and see how the whole situation evolves over the following months.

Next, I looked into a couple of free hosting services and thanks to YouTube; I found out about infinityfree.net which seems to be quite a good hosting service in appearance. It gives you unlimited bandwidth and storage space which sounds too good to be true, and that’s because there’s a small catch. The free version only allows you a maximum of 50k hits per day. Hits, are not the same as views if your website has 50 elements (scripts, images) then those count as 50 hits every time you get a view. However, if you have a medium sized blog, those 50k hits per day should get the job done in the beginning since you could get hundreds of views per day and it would still work correctly.

_{Photo by Kevin Bhagat on Unsplash}

After that, you just have to connect the two, the domain and the host, install Wordpress from your cPanel through Softaculous and you’ve got your blog running for free. Yes, it has some limitations as anything that’s free but, it might be good enough for what you’re looking for.

Next, it comes the designing part; this is where you have to put your blood and effort into creating the best website you can create. If you want to know how I designed this beast of a website entirely for free with pretty much zero skills, make sure to check out my next post where I’ll talk about it in depth.