Iker Santos

This was the week I finally stopped reading about building a WordPress site and actually built one. Following the “Create your personal website” lesson, I set up my own site to host all my WP Credits contributions going forward: ikersantos.blog.

What I did this week

I worked through the lesson step by step, choosing a hosting setup and picking a theme for the site — I went with Bute, which gave me a clean, minimal starting point to build on. I set up the core pages the course recommends: a Home page, an About Me page, and a dedicated WP Credits page to keep all my course posts organized in one place. I also added quick links to my GitHub and email so people checking out my contributions can easily reach me.

What was hard — and how it went

A few classic first-website problems showed up right on schedule:

• Menu and navigation confusion — figuring out the difference between adding a page and adding it to the navigation menu took a couple of tries; my first pages simply weren’t showing up in the header until I manually added them under Appearance and Menus.
• Theme customization vs. content — I initially spent too much time tweaking colors and fonts before I had any real content written. I had to consciously stop, write the WP Credits posts first, and treat the visual polish as something to refine later.
• Image sizing and the hero image — my first attempt at a homepage banner looked stretched and blurry on mobile. I solved it by uploading a properly sized, high-resolution version of the image and letting the theme handle the responsive cropping instead of resizing it manually myself.
• Categories vs. pages — the lesson mentions organizing WP Credits content by category, and I initially confused this with just creating a separate page. I ended up using a category and a page that displays that category’s posts, which solved the organization problem properly.

Challenges & what I learned

This week’s lessons were more hands-on and technical than the previous two, which made them stick a little better. The menu issue taught me something that seems obvious in hindsight but wasn’t at the time: in WordPress, creating content and displaying content are two separate steps, and the platform won’t do the second one automatically just because you did the first. That distinction between content and structure is something I’ll be watching for constantly now, not just with menus but with categories, widgets, and templates too.

The theme-tweaking detour taught me a working-process lesson more than a technical one: it’s easy to mistake visual progress for real progress. Polishing colors felt productive, but the site wasn’t actually more useful to a visitor until it had real content. I learned to prioritize structure and content first, and treat design refinement as a second pass rather than something to perfect upfront.

The image sizing problem was a good reminder that “it looks fine on my screen” isn’t the same as “it works everywhere”. I hadn’t been checking mobile responsiveness as I built, and that’s a habit I want to carry into every future page I create. And the categories and pages confusion taught me to slow down and read how WordPress’s content model actually works instead of assuming it maps directly onto how a normal folder/file structure would. None of these were dramatic failures, but together they gave me a much more realistic sense of what “just build a website” actually involves once you’re the one doing it.