Lesson 0 · Orientation
Five boxes, two journeys
You open: This page, then https://connorclaire.ca
Your website is five services, not one. Visitors take one path. A change you make takes another. This course is those two paths — and which dashboard to open when one of them misbehaves.
WordPress and HostPapa used to be a single building: pages, mail, and the domain name lived together. The new stack splits that on purpose. A bad edit can fail safely, and mail keeps working while the site rebuilds.
A visitor never sees GitHub. A rebuild never rewrites the phone book. If you remember nothing else: the address (Cloudflare) and the house (Vercel) are different objects.
You do not need to become a React developer. You need to know which box does which job, and to click the real screens until they feel ordinary.
Practice
Click each box on the map until you can say its one-sentence job out loud. Then toggle Visit vs Change and watch which boxes light up.
The site itself
Next.js
The code and pages that become connorclaire.ca. Files under app/ are routes; posts/ are blog posts.
- Browser
- Cloudflare
- Vercel
- Page
Mail peels off at Cloudflare (MX) and never enters Vercel. GitHub is not on this path.
Takeaway. Five boxes. Visit path vs change path. Same name, two buildings (site and mail).
Opening this lesson counts as done.