In case you can't tell, I love websites. I love making websites, I love seeing other people's websites, and I love to tell people to make a website. Problem is, most people don't know how! For the past couple of years, the best I could do to help people out was to redirect them to my web building resources links, which while somewhat helpful, could be overwhelming. The purpose of this blog will be to sort of expand on those resources and provide insight on what everything does, and pepper in some personal web building experiences along the way.
This guide will not provide any code for you nor will it show you exactly how I made my sites. The whole point of personal websites is that it's PERSONAL AND UNIQUE TO YOU!! While it's generally ok to look at people's code to see how they did a specific thing, it is NOT okay to straight up lift entire sites or sections of sites, especially without credit.
Ask yourself what your website will be about and what you will put on it. It could be a site about you in general, or maybe a site about something you're interested in, such as your favorite band, cooking, movies, etc. It could also be a combination of any of those things! It can be as broad or specific as you like. If you're making a personal site about you, I highly suggest making a blog or journal page. You might not think you have anything interesting to say, but trust me, you might suprise yourself. I started out my blog with posts about site updates and my personal life, and I kind of shifted towards the online survival guide pretty recently. Having a blog helped me reflect on my life and I started looking into things a bit deeper...Sometimes I don't realize certain things about myself or whatever I'm writing about until I'm in the middle of writing a blog. Whether it's to help yourself or others, I think a blog is probably the most important thing a site can have.
Website hosts are servers that will put your site online. They can be free or paid, and can offer additional resources such as a file editor or site statistics. It's important to explore your options with hosts to see what fits best for you and the site you want to create. If you are just getting started in the personal web, it's best to start off with a free site host and maybe switch to a paid one or paid upgrade if you still feel like you want to keep going after awhile. There are many options to choose from, but I'll stick with the two freemium hosts I know best: Neocities and Nekoweb.
If you have been aware of personal/indie web in the past few years, you might be familiar with Neocities. This is a host that was created in response to the shutdown of GeoCities, a popular site host in the 90's and 00's. This was the site host I started out on and I found it pretty easy to use.
Neocities offers (for free):
Their paid tier is $5 a month and offers:
Nekoweb is a newer host that just launched in 2024, and it's the one that I currently use. Although it's not perfect, I ended up enjoying it and I even started using one of the paid tiers.
Nekoweb offers (for free):
Nekoweb has 2 paid tiers: A $3 tier and a $7 tier.
The $3 tier gives you:
Okay, you have an idea, you have your host, you made your URL, now what? This is the part that tends to scare people the most and is the reason why I technically had a website since 2020, but didn't really use it until 2022. Yes, it's time for you to learn HTML! But don't fret, It's a lot easier than it looks! Once I decided to really figure it out, it only took me a couple of hours to get my website to a functional and somewhat easy to look at state, and about 3 days to polish it up and fill out the pages a bit more. This may or may not be the case for you as we all learn at different speeds and that's okay!
The number one coding resource I always show people is W3schools.com. They provide in-depth tutorials for pretty much every major coding language and even have spaces within the tutorials to try things out yourself! This is what I used to learn HTML (the code that puts words on your website) and CSS (the code that makes your website pretty). The site is easy to navigate and can show you pretty much anything you'd want to do on your site. Sadgrl's HTML & CSS guides can show you other neat things you can do! If you have any specific questions or problems you're running into, Stack Overflow is your friend. There's a good chance someone else on there has had the same question as you, if not then you can make your own post.webformatter.com helps you format your code to make it look neater and point out any errors.
If this is still a bit overwhelming for you, but you still want a site, there are plenty of free to use layouts that you can copy/paste the code from! Here's a list of sites that provide layouts and layout builders. These are great resources if you don't have the time or energy to make something from scratch, and you can learn to customize them more over time. There really isn't a right or wrong way to make a website and you aren't a fraud or less cool for using a site layout, you can kinda just do whatever you want forever.
It's good practice to make your site accessible! Some people can't handle bright flashing colors or have vision problems and it's important to keep that in mind when making a website. I've seen people who are epileptic say they avoid Neocities links altogether because there's so many sites that have flashing lights/images with zero warning whatsoever, and I find it sad that they can't enjoy personal websites due to that. Here's some tools that can help you make your website more accessible.
WAVE will give you an accessibility report after giving them your site URL. it looks for contrast issues, image descriptions, how easy it would be for someone to screen reader to navigate the page, and more things that are often overlooked.
W3's web accessibility evaluation tools list is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, it's a list of different sites that check for accessibility or provide tips. it even has a search function and filters to find exactly what you're looking for.
Color contrast checker is also a great tool to check if your page has enough contrast between the background and words.
If you still want to have bright colors/flashing images/autoplaying audio/etc., you can always make your landing page a warning for what's ahead.
Here's a few fun things that you can add to your website! Smartgb and Atabook are free guestbook hosts. You link them to your site and people can leave little messages! You can also have a live chatbox built into your site using Cbox. You can even add those old school hit counters using free website hit counter. There's too many websites for web graphics/page decoration to add, but my main sources are GifCities and Glitter-graphics.com Unfortunately, there's been a flood of AI generated graphics on there, but you can use the sort by upload date option to find the good stuff.
I hope this inspires you to make a place on the internet you can truly call your own... Sign my guestbook or email me your site (maliceishaunted@aol.com) when you're done and I'll take a look ^_^ good luck have fun
