James Friel / 02 December 2021
Looking round the new Juralio website, you’re probably thinking “wow, what a beautiful and informative website, I wonder what website building platform they used”. The truth is, while we solve wonderfully interesting and technical problems inside Juralio, this site you’re on right now is running on a self-hosted WordPress instance. That’s right, the same platform you had your mid-noughties blog on is still alive and kicking, and looking better than ever.
So how does it all stick together?
A series of tubes, or if you’re not Ted Stevens, AWS Lightsail.
AWS Lightsail is a fantastic service provided by Amazon Web Services for situations just like this.
If you would like to host a website, AWS has you covered for as little as $3.50 a month. They’ll even pre-load WordPress for you! Pair this with a static IP address and you’ve got yourself a website, admittedly not a pretty one. Then there’s server replication and load balancing and DNS routing, but even I find this sentence boring, so I’ll spare you the details and move on to making it look good.
Making it pretty
WordPress has come a long way from plain text and lolcats. There are some really fantastic plugins that can help produce beautiful sites like the one you’re on right now.
Our designers settled on Elementor as their design platform of choice for the website and they got to work. Not too long after, they came back with what you see today.
Great! Let’s get this bad boy online!
Going public
Taking the website live should be as easy as hitting publish, right? That’s what we thought. We’re just saying no to cookies, we’re not showing ads, we’re not tracking, it should be no problem! Boy were we wrong.
It transpired that Elementor was dropping a cookie called… elementor. And that there was no way to turn it off in the Elementor user interface, despite various requests from users over the years. Oh dear. Fortunately we weren’t the only people to stumble upon this issue and a very helpful github user, stefanullinger, provided some tips on how to send these unwanted cookies into the void.
And there we have it, our new website up and running. Looking great, and compliant with our no cookies policy. If you like the site and want to see the really cool stuff we do, get in contact with us and we’ll be happy to give you a demo.
