This weekend I’ve been creating a website for a band that I’m in. I’ve been rehearsing with them for about 5 months, and we had our first gig last weekend. It’s not strictly speaking the band’s first gig, but when you change the bass player and drummer at the same time, then to all intents and purposes it might as well be.

Last week Will (the de facto band leader) decided to increase the online presence of the band. We already had a Facebook page, but he’s signed up for Twitter and various other websites. He also mentioned services that provide band websites on a subscription basis, for £10-25 per month. I decided that this was the perfect opportunity to pop my head up and reveal my superhero identity. “Hey guys, ” I said, or words to that effect, “I do websites. I got this.”

The first few days of building a website are very rewarding. You start with two empty files and a list of things you want to do, and over a period of time this blank canvas starts to develop. You think about structure, in terms of the layout of the page, and the way that you factor your code to make it easy to find the function you need. You create the database tables for your needs, choosing the fields and datatypes that will enable you to store the data tidily and present in the exact way you desire. You spend way too much time looking up the syntax of PHP functions that you haven’t used for a few years. Where the client relationship allows (as, in this case, it does), you can ping an email every few hours saying “hey guys, look what I just added.” and get a “that’s so awesome. You rock.” in return.

The website, and aforementioned social media accounts, are all a bit sparse at the moment. I didn’t write this blog post with the intention of plugging them – I know that a lot of Uborka readers do web design themselves, and if I were to unveil the whole shebang right now I’d be met with a comments box full of polite “that’s great” when what you really want to write is “is that it?” It’s true, it’s not much to look at. But beneath its simple exterior lies some nicely-structured code that will eventually blossom into something elegant and functional.

This is also the first time I’ve worked with tsohost. I’ve been a long time advocate of 34sp but over the years they’ve phased out their entry-level hosting packages, meaning that nowadays I’m paying for much more than I need.