I wanted my own personal website because I noticed that some of my brightest peers have their own websites/online portfolios. I thought that this would be a good way to express myself to both potential recruiters and my stalkers.
I started off with this helpful guide by Thomas Frank, and followed most of those steps for the hosting/initial setup.
After getting a feel for WordPress, I started to make this website my own. I knew that I wanted a dark background and light text for a classy looking “pop.” Choosing a theme that gave me the level of customization that I wanted was one of the hardest parts of creating this website, second to only creating content. For some reason, I got mesmerized by the parallax images and decided to make my landing page a single page, employing the Shapely theme.
For further customizability, I installed a plethora of plugins and pumped my website full of additional CSS. The code is 40% hiding stuff, 30% changing colors, and 30% adjusting spacing.
The majority of the images are taken by me. However, the images of me are not selfies, so other people had to take them. The photos on the homepage are taken by Katherine Lim, Unknown (AUVSI SUAS media), and Sally Deng.