Getting your site online

There are two ways that need no command line at all. Pick either.

The one-click way

Press Deploy on the project page. What happens:

1. A copy of the project is created in your own GitHub account. Not ours. You will need a GitHub account, which is free.
2. A free database and a place to keep your images are set up for you. You never see the keys.
3. You are asked to invent one setup phrase. Write it down. It is what proves the site is yours the first time you open it, and nothing else uses it.
4. A few minutes later you have an address ending in .vercel.app. That is your site.

You can put your own domain on it later, and nothing you have written is affected when you do.

The one-command way

If you have a computer that stays on — a rented server, an old laptop, a Raspberry Pi — somebody comfortable with a terminal can run one command and hand you the address. It is genuinely one command, and the developer docs have it.

This is the option to choose if you would rather not depend on any company at all.

Claiming it

Open your new address. It sends you to a setup page and asks for:

• An email address. Yours. It is how you sign in, and how a forgotten passphrase is reset.
• A passphrase. Long beats complicated — three or four unrelated words is stronger than one word with symbols in it.
• Your setup phrase, if you used the one-click route.

The first person to do this owns the site. Everybody after that is refused. So do it as soon as the address exists, before you send it to anybody.

The four questions

Then you are asked four things, and every one is skippable.

1. Your name and what you do. Goes in the header, the footer and the browser tab.
2. The kind of work you show. This one does more than it looks: it renames sections to language that fits your field. A photographer gets Portfolio and Brands I've shot for where a developer gets Projects and Stack. It changes wording only — nothing you have written can be lost by it, and you can change it again later.
3. A colour. One colour. Everything else is worked out from it, including whether text on it is readable.
4. Publish.

You now have a live site with example content in it. Replace the examples whenever you like; nobody will see them unless you send them the address.

Knowing what is unfinished

The dashboard answers that. It checks your published site and each finding links to the screen that fixes it — a project still in draft, an image with no description, a search description too long to display, an enquiry nobody answered.