How I built two websites to learn marketing — Part 1
I decided to share a little bit of my experience with building the two websites that I am using for learning marketing. I think it is an important part of the journey, and understanding the behind-the-curtains process would be helpful for anyone who is trying to get experience in the marketing world in a similar way.
The main idea behind the two websites is pretty simple: I wanted to have two projects that I can advertise and exercise my marketing skills on. Project number one is the blog you are reading at the moment, and project number two is my music project, where I write my own songs. Let's get into how the websites for these two projects were actually built, what went wrong, and what I did not expect.
The first decision was to choose domain names and buy them somewhere. This is where I had to remind myself how domains actually work. A domain is the address of a website — for example, artsiommarketing.com. You buy it from a domain registrar, a company that sells and manages domain names. Mine are from Namecheap, which is one of the common ones. But buying the address does not give you the website itself. The site has to be built somewhere and live somewhere, and then the address has to be pointed at it. The "live somewhere" part is called hosting: a company's computer, permanently connected to the internet, that stores your site and hands it out to anyone who visits. So a domain on its own is an address pointing at an empty space. You need something to put on it.
That is where the website builder comes on the stage. It is a tool you use to actually make the pages, and most website builders include the hosting as part of the same product — you build the site with them, and it lives on their computers. So in practice the domain gets pointed at the builder, because the builder is also the host.
The next obvious step was actually choosing a website builder. I started with Carrd, because it is cheap, around $19 per year, and it allows several sites on one plan, which was important. For a while everything was fine, but then I started reading about GDPR. It is the European data protection law, and the part relevant here is that if I run a website, I am responsible for the personal data of the people who visit it. Their email addresses, their IP addresses, whatever the site collects. But I do not store that data myself. My website builder does — it holds the site, the newsletter signups, the visitor data. In legal terms, I am the one responsible and they are the ones doing the actual processing on my behalf. And when that is the case, GDPR requires a written contract between us that says what they may do with that data, how they protect it, and what happens if something goes wrong. It is called a data processing agreement, and it is not optional — the law requires it to exist.
So I asked Carrd for theirs, and they told me they do not offer one. Not that it was somewhere on their website, or that I had to request it from a particular department — they simply do not provide that contract. Without that agreement I would be running a website that collects data from European visitors with no legal basis for the company storing it. So that was the end of it.
I have to say here, though, that apart from this problem, Carrd is a very good option that is genuinely easy to use. And when I explained the situation and the fact that I could not use their service anymore, they issued me a refund without a problem. I would definitely recommend it — as long as your site does not collect anything. This problem mostly does not arise if you have a simple static website with no newsletter, no contact form, no analytics and no advertising pixels, because then there is no personal data being handled on your behalf. It also matters less if your visitors are not in Europe. GDPR applies based on who visits your site, not only on where you are based — so a site aimed at people outside Europe has less of this to deal with. My problem was that I needed all of those things — a newsletter, analytics, advertising pixels — on a site aimed at people in the EU.
So I had to find a new website builder, and this is where it became more difficult than I expected. My requirements were simple, or at least they looked like that: cheap, easy to use, clean in terms of GDPR, and — an important one — two websites on one plan. That last requirement eliminated almost everything. Most builders charge per website. Wix, Squarespace and others are all priced that way, so two sites means paying twice. Carrd is an unusual one.
In the end I chose Hostinger, which also allows you to build more than one website on a single plan, just for a higher price than Carrd. Apart from that, it is an EU company based in Lithuania, and it publishes a data processing agreement that is automatically in force when you accept their terms, with the standard contractual clauses already included. Nothing to request, nothing to wait for.
Once the decision about Hostinger was made and I subscribed to their plan, I had to point (or connect) the domains to Hostinger instead of Carrd. That connection is handled by nameservers, which work like the address book of the internet: when somebody types my domain, the nameservers answer the question of where the site actually lives. Changing them means changing the answer — from "the site is at Carrd" to "the site is at Hostinger".
I expected to have to disconnect Carrd first, but that is not how it works. The domain can only point at one place at a time, so pointing it at Hostinger automatically stops it pointing at Carrd. The old site is still sitting on Carrd's computers, but nobody is ever sent there anymore. After the change it takes a while to work everywhere, because that address book is copied across the internet and each copy updates at its own pace. It can take up to 48 hours, though for me it was much faster.
And just like that, we came to the part where I had to actually build the two websites themselves. I made them similar, but different. They both have a minimalistic design, which I like, but the music site is image-led and has only one long page that you can scroll through or jump around in by pressing links in the menu, while the marketing site has several separate pages, uses only text and has no social media links at all.
Both websites also have the legal pages — site notice and privacy policy — that are hidden from the top navigation and linked in the footer. That sounds like one line, and it is one line here. In reality, though, implementing them on the websites was the largest single part of this whole project, and it deserves its own post, which is what Part 2 will be about. See you there.