Embracing #nocode & creating a website

Let’s learn to build a website using name.com and carrd.co in order to create excellent #nocode one page portfolios and more. There are lots of wonderful website builders out there but none faster, easier, and more fun than carrd.co. If you don’t believe me I will show you.

Episode 10 of the 🎙 Gladden Podcast

Embracing the #nocode movement and creating an online portfolio

Saturday April 18, 2020 7:00PM EST
Host: D Garmondyu Whorway
Guest: Adam DJ Brett
Watch: Facebook
Listen: Spreaker
Slides: #nocode slides
Demos: B’Elanna Torres

Watch

Listen

Discounts:

name.com - $5 promo credit
carrd.co
- Users who visit Carrd through your link (or enter your referral code – – directly at checkout) will earn you 30% of the amount paid towards their next Pro upgrade or renewal

Resources and Links:

Sites mentioned on the show:

My Favorite Carrd sites:

Tip Jar

Presentation Outline

Goals

Convince everyone that they should have a website
Show and Tell - In 30 minutes I will a. Show everyone how quick and affordable it is to get started hosting their own site b. demonstrate how to this using name.com and carrd.co.
Give everyone discounts
If you need help I’m just a paypal, venmo, cashapp away @adamdjbrett.
Everyone should have a website
- Freelancers, hobbits, pastors, professors, and politicians all have a website
- especially graduate students
  Why?
- creates your visual and visible centralized hub that curates your digital identity.
- it is way easier and more consistent when someone asks what’s your etsy store, venmo, cashapp, social media to say go to: example.com
- If you have a podcast or live stream and you are making graphics its cleaner and neater to say visit example.com click the youtube button and subscribe etc.

Picking a Domain name

Now that I have convinced you to have a website. How should you have a website?
There are a couple of different ways
1. Have your own domain name like me adamdjbrett.com
2. If you are university affiliated use your institutional hosting like Garmondyu suhrff.syr.edu/
3. Have a subdomain on a popular platform like your-name.wordpress.com, your-name.wix.com, etc

Pros and Cons of each approach

institutional Hosting:
- pros:
  - feels authoritative
  - .edu is cool 😎
  - Free
  - cheap
- Cons:
  - eventually you will change institutions
    - loss of visual identity
    - loss of traffic and incoming links
    - your search engine optimization dies
    - moving platforms is a giant massive pain.
    - If you need help moving platforms pay me, I can help
  - often the URL is quite long and not memorable
- subdomains
  - Pros:
    - free or lowcost
    - ubiquitious popular wix, weebly, WordPress, Squarespace
  - Cons:
    - covered in advertising
    - long urls
    - can feel not as personal
    - exception hcommons
- personal domain name
  - Pros:
    - awesome
    - memorable
    - yours
  - Cons:
    - costs money
    - isn’t always private
    - .com, .net, .name are boring
      A Domain of One’s Own
Virginia Wolff taught us we need a room of one’s own.
You need a domain of your own
A Domain of One’s Own (DoOO) comes out of a project at the University of Mary Washington in the 2000’s.

Code Levels and types

now that I have hopefully convinced you that you need a domain name lets talk about what type of site do you need:

Code levels

High Code.
- I host my site in Jekyll because I like to tweak all the things. I’m working on moving to Eleventy where thus far the gras looks greener.
Medium Code.
- WordPress, Squarespace, etc. You will probably have to configure or code some things and copy paste stuff from stackexchange and hope it works
#nocode.
- A mythical where you just do your thing and don’t stress about life under the hood.
- #Nocode sounds expensive but with the right tools like carrd.co it doesn’t have to be.
  Website Types:
Multi-page: You have all the pages and plan to have even more pages. Both of us have sites like this. Where we have all the data. Now you just gotta up keep the thing.
One-page: You are a genius among mortals and like to keep it simple. You know that one page can have multiple elements.

Show and Tell Portion of the show

Buy a domain name via name.com
Setup Carrd.co
Connect them together

Buy a domain name

There are lots of companies that will sell you a domain name. I like name.com a lot.
- Their customer service has always been quick and responsive for me. They actually read and reply to tweets and emails.
- They have had my back.
- Affordable
- easy to use
- only thing I don’t like is privacy isn’t included in the price but an extra add-on
- again lots of domain resellers like hover.com, namecheap.com, but name.com is mine.
  Domain options
- Classics
  - .com, .net, .org
- Country Codes
  - .af, .co, .fm, .in, .us, .tv
- New gTLDs
  - .cool, .coffee, .expert, .style

Hosting your new awesome site.

Again one page website

Carrd.co offers two levels
Pro Lite: $9 a year. up to 3 sites. Subdomains only but there are unbranded subdomains like crd.co and uwu.ai
Pro Standard: $20 a year up to 10 sites and custom domains are incldued Today I will be using pro standard in my presentation

Setup

pick a template. If you don’t like those defaults you can of course DIY or visit templates-of.carrd.co
add your information
for academics: host your CV on Google Docs, or some other online service.
One thing I have learned from coding is keep your code DRY
- Don’t :claps: Repeat :claps: yourself :claps:
- Academics we are terrible at this 19 versions of your CV, putting it online as a PDF and its out of date by the time it goes up
- Make it easy to update. Keep once nice copy in a lovely online doc tool site. Now you only have to update it in once place and people can view it easily on whatever a device
- seriously PDFs are terrible. Especially on phones. UGH the worst.
- Give us a responsive document
I could make a lovely interactive and visual CV here. Instead I will link to the CV
now lets publish
you can visit the site at https://bleannatorres.uwu.ai/
done

Conclusion

We talked about

Why you should have a Website
Why you should embrace #nocode for so many things. I love the low barrier of entry and how Carrd helps open the web back up for so many types of things
We bought a domain name from name.com
We setup carrd.co
We left a tip?

Thank you to Garmondyu for being such a wonderful host and having me on the Gladden Podcast which hopefully one day soon will have its own domain name and landing page possibly even with Carrd.co