Kamlesh Kumar

My Journey at DigitalArka: 20+ Live Websites, and Counting

When I joined DigitalArka on 10 February 2026, I had never deployed a website to a live server. I had never built an e-commerce store from scratch, and I had definitely never published an epaper news portal. Since then, I have shipped 20+ live websites for the company and its clients – the company’s own website, a complete newspaper epaper platform, a fully redesigned news website, multiple WooCommerce and Shopify e-commerce stores, a vacation villas website built from scratch, and several React projects – and along the way I have also picked up React, Shopify, and PHP development, plus hands-on technical SEO.

At my previous company, my role was mostly limited to converting Figma designs into HTML and making them dynamic on a local server. The designs were already handed to me – polished and finalized – so I rarely got the chance to use my own design judgment or shape how a website should actually look and feel. That changed after I joined DigitalArka. Here, I started choosing designs myself – thinking not just about how a page looks, but about how a user actually experiences it. Websites like DigitalArka’s own site and SanjhStay are examples where I personally selected the design direction, layout, and UI elements – right down to the color themes – based on what would work best for the end user, not just what looked good on a mockup.

So along with development, I also picked up real hands-on knowledge of design, UI/UX, and SEO during my time here – areas where, honestly, my exposure at my previous company was minimal. This post is my honest account of how that happened, written in my own words, because I believe the best way to judge any company is to hear directly from the people it trains.

Who I Am

My name is Kamlesh Kumar, and I work as a web developer at DigitalArka. Like most developers starting out, I knew the fundamentals: HTML, CSS, a bit of JavaScript, and WordPress. What I did not have was real production experience, the kind where a mistake is visible to the whole world and a deadline actually matters. That is exactly what DigitalArka gave me, step by step, starting from my very first week. You can connect with me professionally on LinkedIn, where I share the work I do.

Joining DigitalArka: 10 February 2026

I joined the company on 10 February 2026. In my first days, I quickly realised there was a gap between the tutorials I had practiced on my local machine and the reality of professional development. On my local setup, I could break anything and nobody would ever see it. On a real project, everything I touched mattered. What made the difference was that I was never left alone to figure that gap out on my own.

My First Live Server Experience: DigitalArka.com

At the start, I had never worked on a live server. Everything I had built before lived on localhost. When I joined DigitalArka, I got my first real opportunity to work on a live hosting environment, specifically Hostinger, and honestly, the first deployment was intimidating. File permissions, DNS, SSL, staging versus production, the difference between “it works on my machine” and “it works for everyone”: these are the things no tutorial fully prepares you for.

Wherever I got stuck, my senior at DigitalArka guided me properly, showing me exactly where the difficulty was and why the fix worked, instead of just fixing it for me. That is why my first live project was also the company’s own website, digitalarka.com. I built it completely from scratch: a brand new website with a fresh, animated design for our own company, DigitalArka. It makes sense in hindsight that the company trusted me with its own public face first. Building and maintaining digitalarka.com taught me the full cycle of professional web work: deployment, debugging on a real server, animation and interaction design, and taking responsibility for a site that actual visitors depend on.

Building an Epaper News Website for the First Time: epaper.hindustanekta.com

After digitalarka.com, I was given the responsibility of building epaper.hindustanekta.com, an epaper news website for Hindustan Ekta. This was a completely new category for me, because I was building an epaper news site for the very first time in my life.

An epaper is not just a normal website with articles. It has its own logic: daily edition management, page-by-page newspaper layouts, archives that readers can browse back through, and performance requirements, because newspaper readers expect the day’s edition to load instantly every single morning. I ran into many new and genuinely difficult problems during this build, problems I had never seen in any tutorial.

What I remember most is that instead of pressuring me, my senior gave me the time to learn while building. The expectation was not “know everything on day one”; it was “keep learning and keep shipping”. With that support, I delivered the epaper site, and it became one of the projects I am proudest of, because it pushed me into territory I had never entered before.

Redesigning the Main News Website: hindustanekta.com

Next came hindustanekta.com, the main website of Hindustan Ekta. The newspaper already had an older design, and my job was to rebuild it into a new, better-looking, faster design that readers would actually enjoy using every day.

A news website is a content machine, so beyond the visual redesign, I built custom post types so the editorial team could publish articles and news in a clean, organised way. This project taught me something important about professional development: it is not only about how a site looks on launch day, it is about how easily the people who run the site can work with it every day after that. A good design paired with a good publishing workflow is what makes a news website genuinely useful.

My First End-to-End E-commerce Website: kandarpa.in

Then I was handed a completely different challenge: kandarpa.in, a WooCommerce e-commerce website. This was the first time in my life I was building a complete online store from the starting point to the end, and it came with a long list of issues I had to face: product setup and variations, cart and checkout behaviour, payment flow, shipping logic, and the hundred small details that separate a demo store from a store that can actually take real orders.

Once again, DigitalArka did not leave me to drown. The company supported me through every issue with a focus on learning, walking me through the problems until I understood them deeply enough to solve the next one myself. Finishing kandarpa.in end to end changed how I see myself as a developer: I had become someone who can own a full e-commerce build, not just a page.

Technical Optimisation Work: pilgrimshabitat.com

Not every project I take on is a build from scratch. On pilgrimshabitat.com, I was brought in to improve an existing website rather than start a new one, and that turned out to be its own kind of learning. I worked on the site’s page speed, optimising assets and load times so pages feel noticeably faster. I configured the .htaccess file for caching, redirects, and server-level rules, and I added an llms.txt file to the site, which is now becoming a standard alongside robots.txt for guiding how AI and large language model crawlers access a site’s content. Alongside the technical work, I also improved parts of the design to make the site cleaner and more user-friendly.

This project taught me something different from the from-scratch builds: real skill is also being able to walk into someone else’s existing codebase, understand it quickly, and make it faster, cleaner, and more future-ready without breaking what already works. That is a very different discipline from greenfield development, and DigitalArka gave me the chance to build it.

Moving Into React, Shopify and PHP

After proving myself on the WooCommerce builds and technical work, I got the opportunity I had been working towards: working on React websites. Moving from WordPress and WooCommerce into React is a significant step for any developer, and DigitalArka actively created that path for me inside the company rather than expecting me to leave and find it somewhere else.

My work did not stop at WordPress and React. At DigitalArka I also started handling Shopify stores and websites built on custom PHP, so today I am comfortable moving between four different stacks depending on what a project actually needs, instead of being tied to just one platform. That range is something I did not have when I joined, and it has made me a far more flexible developer.

Building a Vacation Villas Website From Scratch: saanjhstays.com

One of the projects I am most proud of is saanjhstays.com, a villas and vacation-stays website that I built completely from scratch. Unlike the news and epaper sites, a villas website has to sell an experience: the property galleries, room and villa listings, amenities, and enquiry or booking flow all have to work together to make a visitor want to stay there. Building it end to end – structure, design, and content – meant thinking like a hospitality brand and not just a developer, and it is a project I point to whenever someone asks to see what I can build independently.

Learning SEO: From Zero Knowledge to Building SEO-Friendly Websites

Before I joined DigitalArka, I did not have much knowledge of SEO. I could build a website, but I did not really understand why one site ranks and another does not. Working here changed that completely. Alongside development, I picked up real, working SEO knowledge – on-page structure, clean URLs, heading hierarchy, image alt text, page speed, mobile-friendliness, and the basics of technical SEO – not from a course, but from applying it directly on live projects.

That knowledge has changed the way I build. Now, whenever I develop a website, I build it according to SEO best practices from the start, instead of treating SEO as something to fix after launch. It has genuinely helped me a lot as a developer, because a site that is fast, well-structured, and technically clean is a better site for everyone, not just for search engines. Today I also handle technical SEO work on the websites I build and maintain, which is a skill I simply did not have when I walked in on 10 February 2026.

The Environment That Makes This Growth Possible

I want to be specific about why my time here so far has felt the way it has, because culture is a real factor in how fast a developer grows:

• Flexible office timings – the company trusts us to manage our time around the work, which keeps me focused and productive instead of watching the clock.
• A genuinely good nature and environment – people here are helpful and approachable, which makes it easy to ask questions early instead of getting stuck silently for days.
• Guidance at the right moments – on every project, from the epaper site to the e-commerce and villas builds, my senior guided me exactly where difficulties came up, so every blocker turned into a lesson.
• Learning time that is actually respected – I was allowed to learn new skills, including React, Shopify, PHP, and SEO, while delivering real work, not told to first become an expert and then start working.

What Working at DigitalArka Has Taught Me

Looking back at 10 February 2026, the difference is hard to miss. Since joining, I have:

• Gone from never touching a live server to confidently deploying and maintaining production websites on Hostinger.
• Built my first epaper news platform, solving problem categories I did not even know existed before.
• Redesigned a full news website with a proper publishing workflow for articles and news.
• Delivered a complete WooCommerce e-commerce website from scratch, end to end, with kandarpa.in.
• Improved an existing live website, pilgrimshabitat.com, on page speed, the .htaccess file, an llms.txt file, and design.
• Built a vacation villas website, saanjhstays.com, completely from scratch.
• Started working with React, and expanded into Shopify and custom PHP development.
• Gone from having almost no SEO knowledge to building websites according to SEO best practices and handling technical SEO.
• Crossed 20+ live websites shipped for DigitalArka and its clients, and counting.

The biggest lesson, though, is not technical. It is that growth accelerates when you work somewhere that gives you real responsibility, real guidance, and real room to learn, all at the same time. Time has flown since I joined, and honestly, I do not even notice how quickly it goes, because I am enjoying the work and the learning every single day.

What Is Next

I am now focused on going deeper into React, taking on bigger Shopify and PHP builds, and applying technical SEO more deeply across DigitalArka’s client projects. If you are reading this because you are considering working with DigitalArka, here is what my story should tell you: this is a company that invests in its people, guides them through real projects with patience, and as a result, delivers developers who have genuinely built and shipped real websites, not just watched courses. 20+ live websites, and counting. I am still working here, and I am just getting started.

Frequently Asked Questions

About the Author

Kamlesh Kumar is a web developer at DigitalArka, where he has worked since 10 February 2026, building 20+ production websites across WordPress, WooCommerce, React, Shopify, and PHP, including news and epaper platforms, e-commerce stores, and a vacation villas website, while also handling technical SEO. Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kamlesh-kumar-81212b268/