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 maybe pepper in some personal web building experiences along the way.
sidenote: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, like this one, or maybe a site about something you're interested in, such as your favorite band, cooking, movies, etc. 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 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 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.
other things you can put on your site
website hosts are servers that will put your website 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.org. 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 50GB of storage, 3000GB of bandwidth, all time site statistics, the ability to upload any file type, the ability to create up to 30 sites per account (although you can just make different accounts, but don't abuse that too heavily you might get ip banned...), among other things that i don't have the knowledge to tell you about. this is a pretty solid host, but i did switch due to some problems i had with it, mainly with the file editor becoming extremely laggy if there's too many lines of code, causing me to break up some of my site pages into multiple pages, the inability to upload .bmp files unless i paid, and i kind of didn't like the social features. i found myself obsessing over my site stats and follower account and it got too social media-y for me.
nekoweb.org is a newer host that just launched last year, 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 (what i'm on) and a $7 tier. the $3 tier gives you 10 GB of storage, 100k max file limit, 1 year of site stats, custom domain support, up to 10 sites per account (you can have up to 2 accounts on nekoweb otherwise you will get banned), unlimited bandwith, and a bunch of other stuff i don't have the knowledge to explain. the $7 tier gives you password protection for pages and all time site stats.
for me, i prefer nekoweb due to the file editor not being laggy and the extra little features it has compared to neocities, it let me upload .bmp files for free which is great for my evanescence archive site, and the follower/site stats thing is a lot less intrusive than neocities, so i don't find myself being concerned over all that. that being said, i still do run into some problems on here. for one, their discord server is... not the greatest place. people get away with a lot and there's drama and chronically online people and other shit and i don't like the idea of using a discord server as a means of getting tech support. of course, there's other ways to get support such as email and a contact us forum, but the site explicitly says that discord is the fastest way to get support, so naturally people might gravitate to it. personally i think it would make sense to have a forum for that as it's easier to find information on there so you don't have people asking the same thing over and over, but i'm not the one who runs this place and i'm sure dimden has her reasons for preferring discord. i've also had to deal with some glitches here and there, but the site is still getting updates and patches, so i'll live. the file limit did mess with my archive site a bit which is why i upgraded, so if you plan on making an image-heavy site, this might not be the right place for you.
i encourage you to go to the hosting sites yourself to check out the features for yourself and maybe try to find other hosting sites to see which one will fit best for you.
okay, you have a host, you made your URL, now what? this is the part that tends to get 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. October'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 coding mistakes.
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. layouts are a somewhat...i wouldn't say controversial, but more of a fairly debated topic in indieweb circles... i personally think they're a great tool to make personal web more accessible as both a jumping off point or more of a permanent thing if you so choose. 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.
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
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