Purpose and Goals
This website serves as both a personal food blog and a digital marketing portfolio piece. The primary purpose is to document and share authentic West African recipes, particularly focusing on jollof rice and traditional dishes from Nigeria and the broader West African region. The target audience includes West Africans living abroad who want to recreate home cooking, food enthusiasts interested in exploring new cuisines, and home cooks looking for reliable, tested recipes.
The goals for this project include creating a comprehensive resource for West African cooking with clear instructions and proper measurements, building an engaged community around West African food culture, demonstrating my ability to create and manage digital content as part of my marketing education, and developing skills in content strategy, SEO, social media marketing, and website management.
This website will be part of my professional portfolio, showcasing my ability to identify a target audience, create relevant content, build an online presence, and use digital marketing tools effectively. The skills developed through this project – content creation, SEO optimization, social media integration, email marketing through newsletters, and analytics tracking – directly align with my career goals in digital marketing. Upon graduation, this website will demonstrate both my technical abilities and my understanding of how to build and maintain an engaged online audience.
Hosting Provider Selection Rationale
After researching several web hosting providers, I chose Bluehost because it met my main needs in reliability, WordPress support, customer service, and price.
Bluehost made it easy to set up my website with one click WordPress installation. It also includes a free SSL certificate, which helps keep the site secure and improves search engine visibility. The plan has enough storage and bandwidth to handle a blog with a lot of images and posts.
Customer support was important to me. Bluehost offers support at any time through live chat and email, which was helpful during setup. The control panel is simple to use, so I can manage my domain, email, and backups without needing advanced skills.
Price also mattered. Bluehost is affordable for a student and includes useful features like backups, email accounts, and access to themes and plugins. Even though there are free options, Bluehost provides a more stable and professional service, which is important since this site is part of my portfolio.
Loading speed and performance were also factors. Faster websites give a better experience and help with search rankings. Bluehost provides good performance for my needs.