Alexander Sieman
About Posts Projects

Personal Website, Version 1.0

In August 2018, I decided to make a personal website using Python and Django.

Why Build a Personal Website?

I wanted to build a personal website to learn more about web programming and design, and to showcase some of my skills and recent projects.

Why Use Django and Python?

Previously, I have used Wordpress for a personal blog, but wanted the flexibility of a website designed from scratch in order to build custom themes and add custom features as desired. I looked for a web framework that I could use to handle the backend database portion of the site, and settled on Django, a Python-based framework with detailed documentation and a large, active community.

Django offered the ability to quickly generate (and iterate) the website backend- I was able to get a working version of the website, with most of the website’s current features, created in just a few hours. So in just a few hours (over a couple of weekends), I was able to get the basic functionality of the site implemented, and get the site launched (currently hosted through Python Anywhere). For the frontend, I used HTML and CSS to create a custom theme for the site, rather than using a pre-baked template.

What Resources Did You Use to Start Building This Site?

Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of helpful resources I used to help get up to speed on Django, HTML, and CSS, and to help inspire the site’s design and layout (more to be added as more features are added to the site):

Other helpful sites, such as Stack Overflow and w3schools.com, proved indispensable in helping to get the website to look just right, since I had limited previous experience with HTML and CSS. In future posts, I will expand upon some specific packages and plugins I used for the website’s backend.

List of posts related to this project: