After spending over a whole week from 12 June to 21 June working on this site everyday, I finally did it! The basics are done and Atelier Tenko is up and running!
All the necessary links and pages are made, and I now have a total of 11 posts. I also made an AdSense account this morning and sent the site for Google’s review. As of now, the site is launched and open to public, but I’ll probably tell people of its existence only after I’m approved by AdSense, and once I’ve finished uploading all my other works that I have in my archives. (There’s still a mountain!)
But cheers for having come this far! I’m so excited! Looking forward to the AdSense results. I’ll make more posts in the meantime and work on my other projects.
I’ll be documenting the progress so far and this site’s creation process below. Hang around if you want to hear it!
Day 1 – The Beginning
On the night of Saturday, 12 June, I bought my domain, atelier-tenko.com from Bluehost. My days have been filled with joy and excitement since then! Seeing my own original website name in the internet’s address bar for the first time’s got to be one of the most exciting moments of my life. I’ve always wanted to do this for at least 5 years.
I love how Bluehost puts it as “time to take on the world” and “It’s the beginning of your adventure”. Doing this for the first time, it certainly felt as though I have just entered a new place, carrying a huge bag of hope and dreams! It certainly put a smile on my face. Wonder where my feet will take me!
I was watching several tutorials on YouTube to buy and set up the site. Following along, I installed the Astra theme and Elemontor plugin. Then I started looking for a theme in the Starter Templates for my site. I ended up choosing ‘Simply Natural’ because I’m making an art blog, and the layout for the pictures in this theme looked perfect.
It was getting late, but feeling excited and wanting to make as much progress as possible, I couldn’t help starting to work on my homepage!
Satisfied with the progress I made for the day, I went to sleep.
Day 2 – Making a Home
Sunday, 13 June. The moment I woke up, I was immediately back on my computer!
I replaced all the placeholder images on the homepage with my own. I also did a lot of tweaking to make sure the picture sizes and positioning look right. Also double checked if the visuals didn’t turn weird in the site’s phone version. It was really starting to look like ‘my place’ now. A comfortable place to live in!
I was still unfamiliar with the controls and how the plugins work. Seeing various new terms like ‘focus keyphrase’ and ‘meta description’ among others got me Googling a lot of things. I also made my first post to see how the posting system works.
Other than that, I poked around to familiarize myself with WordPress’ systems, such as how to use categories, tags and pages. Then I planned my site map and made my categories. My blogging experiences on other sites in the past really helped!
Day 3 – Making the Gallery
14 June. Monday! Work took up half the day, but I was intent on working on my site on lunch break and after work.
This is an art blog, so I needed to figure out how to set up a proper gallery. I make multi-page comics and comic series a lot, too. So a gallery and page layout that’s easy to look at and browse becomes doubly important!
Before deciding on anything, I went to multiple art and webcomic blogs to see how other people structure theirs. Then, to figure out how the gallery function works and looks, I made a test post with my old comics. Then I looked up some gallery plugin recommendations on Google and YouTube.
There were quite a lot of good ones, but after testing several of them, I decided that simple is best! I ended up just making my gallery with Elementor’s Basic Gallery. I also got the Essential Addons for Elementor plugin to make my post grid. By the end of the day, I’ve successfully created my home page’s Newest Works section. Probably the most important part of the page!
I also poked at the other functions a little and discovered how to edit my side bar, so I played with that.
Day 4 – Making Proper Posts
15 June. Now that we’ve made the foundation and rooms of our house, time to put in the furniture—our posts! I wanted to check out how the Post Grid’s query system works and looks like, so I decided to make at least one post in each category.
I post various works, so I put the project titles in a bracket in all the titles so they’re easily recognizable. Particularly useful when they appear in my side bar’s ‘Recent Posts’ section where you can only see the title but not the category and thumbnails. While writing the posts, I also familiarized myself with the AIOSEO functions. I found it very convenient to have!
After I finished making my posts, I tried sorting them with the Post Grid’s query system to see if it was working like I expected. It worked just as I thought, so yay! That finished my work for the day.
Day 5 – Seeing things in Action, Fixing the Site Map
16 June. By Day 5, I was quite familiar with how all the basics work. I can make pages and posts with no problem now, so I decided to do a major thing—start uploading a whole webcomic project!
I decided to go with ‘NINURTA‘, my collab comic that I made with my friend Denta-san. It was the first multi-chaptered comic series that I’ve ever completed, so why not? (With Denta-san’s permission, of course.) So I uploaded the pages of Chapter 1 and got ready to post.
And then we had a problem!
I was suddenly unsure how to best structure my site. Other sites I saw either only had one webcomic or a few projects at most, so they were simple and didn’t require that much categorizing. Me, I had over 10 different projects sitting in my folder which I was planning to upload. (And I’m sure one day they’ll reach 30 or even 50!)
My category structure at the time was:
Category > Works > Comic > NINURTA
It looked nice, clean and easy to navigate. But then I thought of the 50 different new categories that were going to appear after that. Navigating them sounded like a nightmare and they would look quite horrible on the sidebar and drop down menu! Multimedia projects belonging in multiple categories would also be confusing.
So after thinking hard, I decided to stop the categories at Comic and use the categories more as the Post Grid’s sorting tool, rather than for visitors to browse. I set up a Works Page to archive all my projects instead. A thumbnail and a summary of each project should make it easy for people to find the work that they want to see.
Day 6 & 7 – Restructuring, Making all the Necessary Pages
17 and 18 June. With Day 5’s incident, I decided to rethink my site’s whole structure.
I started by making NINURTA’s Main Page. It was a test to see if my new structure idea worked as it should, while still looking good and easy to browse. I divided the page into subsections of comic, illustration and character sheets, so you can get where you want quickly. (Ages of browsing through Wikipedia and looking at art book structures really paid off!)
So far, it looked great! My new structure idea was fully dependent on the Post Grid’s query system to get the right post to the right place. So each post’s tags came to have a huge role. I went back to fix all the tag and titles of all the existing posts so that they were functioning properly with the Post Grid.
Things started to take shape and settle down after that. Happy with what I had, I moved on to work on the About Page. I also made a separate main page for each project. The Blog section was suffering from a similar problem with the Works section yesterday, so I made a Blog Page to archive the posts too.
I was planning on uploading at least 5 different projects altogether, but decided to cut it down to just 2 (NINURTA and Tenko-chan!) for now. The site and post structure might still need a lot of editing, so I’ll keep it simple and post the others after things have settled down.
Day 8 – Making more Posts
19 June. Finally, the weekend was here! Moment of truth! Time to make more posts and see if my new site structure actually worked.
I uploaded NINURTA Chapter 1 and Ninurta’s character sheet. The queries I’ve set up on NINURTA’s main page worked perfectly and I was satisfied with how the page looked. Yay! For online works, having a share button was important, so I went and looked up how to set it up. I got the Sassy Social Share plugin and it did the job beautifully.
I spent the rest of the day rechecking and refining existing posts and tags. With everything now in place, the site was almost done!
Day 9 – Making more Posts, Wrapping Up
20 June. Spent the day uploading more NINURTA posts and making sure that I didn’t overlook anything.
With the structure and base of the site set up, it became very easy to write and organize new posts even for myself! I think the site structure had settled down nicely and they were well-tested by now. So I decided to go back and spend some time brushing up the existing posts and pages to fit the site’s current structure. I also checked if all the links were functioning properly and not broken. Then I checked for any placeholder texts or images that I’ve left behind and fixed them.
Lastly, the important stuff. I went and looked up how to make the Privacy Policy page. After testing several plugins, I liked the version generated by WP AutoTerms. I was aiming to set up Google AdSense after this, and that plugin had AdSense’s terms conveniently written in it. Amazing!
With this, Atelier Tenko was almost done!
Day 10 – Site Logo and Google AdSense
21 June. The last part was a super important part—the site logo!
My mascot and symbol’s a fox, so my logo would be a fox, too. I wanted it to be a simple and minimalist one that anyone can easily draw and remember, so this morning, I came up with this!
Happy with my creation, I inserted it wherever the site logo was required. Double check through the whole site after that and ta-da! Atelier Tenko (basic version) was officially done! The screenshots below is how the homepage looks like right now.
Satisfied and happy, I launched the site and looked up how to set up a Google AdSense account, my next goal. It was quite simple, so I managed to set everything up in a few minutes with the help of Google’s Site Kit plugin.
Finally, I sent the site for Google’s review. The job’s done and it’s time to wait. Hoping for the best!
And there you go!
That’s the documentation of my website creation process so far. It was an exciting process from start to finish! I can’t express how much I missed typing blog posts. I was like a fish returned to water!
I’ll report again when Google’s review results come in. (I’ll definitely retry even if I didn’t pass.) In the meantime, I’ll work on uploading my whole archive of works. Can’t wait till I finish this site and show it to my friends, but I’ll be patient. Until next time!
