The month was August 2019. Sitting on a creaky office chair, I was doom scrolling Facebook in my parent's home, not knowing what to do after graduating with my undergraduate degree. After row and rows of friend posts and featured news, I saw a blog post shared by a friend. However, it's not your usual blog post because it was from his website. He wrote about how he designed his website from scratch with Bootstrap and said the experience helped him better understand front and back-end development as well as web design. I was naturally amazed because, since high school, I had always dreamed of owning, programming and designing my website.

However, I have no prior knowledge of doing it and have never had the chance to learn it. Being an unemployed 22-year-old with nothing else to do (other than stressing myself from looking for jobs), I set myself a plan to learn the trade. My final goal was one; I wanted to make a website to resharpen my writing skill and re-spark my childhood hobby. Then, after hours of googling to look where to start, I gave up. Most websites designed from scratch are too simple and cannot cater to my goal, especially when made by a total newbie like me. Because of that, I resorted to WordPress, working with free templates to make my blog. I then looked for the perfect free template for a while before finally deciding on buying a domain and a three-year website hosting package.

The final result was okay. It looked simple, but it didn't have enough customisation to satisfy my past graphic designer self. The free template was too rigid, and my website was too laggy after I added plugins to allow for more customisations. In the end, I decided to keep the website as is and promised myself to upgrade the website once I managed to add more content. Unfortunately, I could not keep that promise because, after three years, I only managed to post four articles, one of which was an essay I copy-pasted straight from my university assignment.

After three years has passed, my web domain and hosting expired. With only four blog posts on my old website, I realised that I was putting myself under too much pressure to make high-quality opinion pieces and economics essays. Learning from this mistake, I promised myself to create blog posts with a lighter mood every week akin to a weekly diary of my thoughts. This time, I will make articles ranging from diary posts, travel blogs, and opinion pieces to train for research publications, which include popular science essays. Essentially, writing anything I want for a scheduled time without the constraint I previously set for myself.

Hopefully, with this new goal and a website design upgrade, I can make more content and grow this website as an outlet for my writing hobby. Fingers crossed!