So you decided to make your own website: where do you start?

[saint6ix]

Here's a site filled with helpful links on making your site:
Daniel's Network: How To Make Your Own Site!
Daniel's Network is also a pretty cool place to find handmade site n' other cool stuff too

Daniel's site is now discontinued . Any others like his??

 

[elia925-6]

I'm making a website using three.js

 

[DOOM95.EXE]

I created my first site back in 1997 when Angelfire was around and the maximum free webhost space was 2 MB. I could barely fit a few pages, MIDI files and Quake maps. Everything was static HTML and written by hand through trial & error. Later on I downloaded a warez copy of MS Frontpage and it became trivial to make edits.

I have Dreamhost today which is cheap and has "unlimited" disk space and bandwidth. I only really use it to host my friend's domain and move large files like DVD rips around. But I kinda want that to change.

Wordpress and other CMS are big, bloaty, slow and shitty imho... so I tried out Jekyll and I like it but it's kinda buggy. What are my other options in 2022? Static site generators look like the way to go.

 

[Cinderpeach]

Daniel's site is now discontinued . Any others like his??

Ohh, sorry but thanks for the heads ups here's a similar website made by someone who is friends with Melon King and it's basically the same vibe, I think sadness has more links on her main site as well
Sadness's Learn Html Site

 

[elia925-6]

My problem is there aren't good html editors for windows. Dreamweaver is expensive and sometimes it crashes(Adobe should adopt autodesk's model of providing software free for students), figma is good but it misses some things and not good support for css frameworks and sketch is available only for mac. I wish affinity released a software like this since they are decent alternatives.

 

[mydadiscar]

How about if you want your own domain? Like dadiscar.com or something? How does one do that?

 

[ZinRicky]

How about if you want your own domain? Like dadiscar.com or something? How does one do that?

You can go to https://porkbun.com/products/domains or https://www.namecheap.com/domains/explore-new-tlds/ for example. You purchase a TLD and set your infrastructure accordingly

 

[Yakito]

I remember running into this a while ago.
https://landchad.net/ It has some help, aimed on the open source side of things if interested.

 

[Cinderpeach]

My problem is there aren't good html editors for windows. Dreamweaver is expensive and sometimes it crashes(Adobe should adopt autodesk's model of providing software free for students), figma is good but it misses some things and not good support for css frameworks and sketch is available only for mac. I wish affinity released a software like this since they are decent alternatives.

I use Atom and it works just fine for me, its open-source and free

 

[LostintheCycle]

This thread inspired me to set up my own site. In the last 24 hours I think I've made decent progress. I've had half-assed learning attempts at HTML in the past but nothing serious, just real basic stuff. I have got some C++ experience and I regularly use LaTeX, so I'm finding it pretty easy so far. It feels honest doing the HTML myself, I don't think I'd be as invested as if I were doing this on a website making webapp. I just check w3schools when I have to. I dunno if I'll post a link, because like another user said, I don't want to unnecessarily link my Agora profile to my site. But honestly, I'm having a blast with this.

 

[№56]

What, in your guys' opinion, is the secret to making an interesting old-school static website that people will want to look at more than once? How should it be designed, and what kind of content suits the format best?
I set up a neocities page about a year ago but quickly burnt out on the project. I didn't really have a plan for what I wanted to post or how the site should be laid out. I was also trying to use it as a photo gallery, which proved to be more irritating than I thought it would be. It seems like a lot of people on neocities have similar problems, and most of the pages on the publicly-searchable index are unfinished or abandoned. The average site there is "hey guys welcome to my epic website lol under construction uwu" and not much else.
I want to start over from scratch and give making a personal website another shot. Something simple that could serve as mirror for any effortposts I make here or for other bits of content I think are worth sharing or backing up. Initially this would be on neocities, but I'd like to switch over to self-hosting at some point. I've already got some ideas on how to avoid the mistakes I made the first time, but if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

 

[Deleted member 4436]

What, in your guys' opinion, is the secret to making an interesting old-school static website that people will want to look at more than once? How should it be designed, and what kind of content suits the format best?
I set up a neocities page about a year ago but quickly burnt out on the project. I didn't really have a plan for what I wanted to post or how the site should be laid out. I was also trying to use it as a photo gallery, which proved to be more irritating than I thought it would be. It seems like a lot of people on neocities have similar problems, and most of the pages on the publicly-searchable index are unfinished or abandoned. The average site there is "hey guys welcome to my epic website lol under construction uwu" and not much else.
I want to start over from scratch and give making a personal website another shot. Something simple that could serve as mirror for any effortposts I make here or for other bits of content I think are worth sharing or backing up. Initially this would be on neocities, but I'd like to switch over to self-hosting at some point. I've already got some ideas on how to avoid the mistakes I made the first time, but if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

I've been thinking about this a bit as well, since I'm not satisfied with my website on the moment and haven't updated it in a while. I'm looking over some of the top pages on Neocities, and, at least on the desktop sites, the primary issue is inconsistency.
A lot of sites have these cool looking front pages and layouts, but as soon as you click on one of the links (assuming that the page even exists and doesn't lead to a 404), then you'll often end up with something that looks like it's a different website. Other then that, I think that static sites should have a minimal amount of scrolling in them. Most of the websites on Neocites like to fit everything into a square in the middle of the page, leaving a lot of space on both the left and the right. I can get why you might want to show off some cool images there, but most of the time it's just empty. Also, a lot of the layouts are just large enough that they can't be contained on the screen all at once. Surely, it would make more sense to just use a bit more of the margins to fit everything on at once, but I guess not.

The other big problem is that a lot of these sites don't 'do anything'. If you're actively trying to go against the mainstream web's minimalism, then I can understand wanting to have as many elements on screen as possible. For most sites though, this only ends up creating the illusion of size, since most of the links on sites don't actually lead anywhere. Just don't add a bunch of entries to your site map/navigation bar/whatever that aren't actually finished yet and you should be fine.

 

[giftlift]

the real tricks to make static web pages do unique things is javascript. ive been building static web pages since 2012ish html5 does really cool stuff too.
my clients where always happy that they dont have to pay for web hosting and the loading speed and consistency always makes them rank highest for seo.
its a fun challenge making static pages do things that php sites can do with no real back end. (used to host everything on github pages) so all they had
to pay for was a domain name. that was back when everyones websites werent mobile compatible and you could get like 5 jobs a day just calling people
up and telling them their site looks like shit on a phone.

 

[gsyme]

My problem is there aren't good html editors for windows. Dreamweaver is expensive and sometimes it crashes(Adobe should adopt autodesk's model of providing software free for students), figma is good but it misses some things and not good support for css frameworks and sketch is available only for mac. I wish affinity released a software like this since they are decent alternatives.

bruh...

 

[gsyme]

What, in your guys' opinion, is the secret to making an interesting old-school static website that people will want to look at more than once? How should it be designed, and what kind of content suits the format best?
I set up a neocities page about a year ago but quickly burnt out on the project. I didn't really have a plan for what I wanted to post or how the site should be laid out. I was also trying to use it as a photo gallery, which proved to be more irritating than I thought it would be. It seems like a lot of people on neocities have similar problems, and most of the pages on the publicly-searchable index are unfinished or abandoned. The average site there is "hey guys welcome to my epic website lol under construction uwu" and not much else.
I want to start over from scratch and give making a personal website another shot. Something simple that could serve as mirror for any effortposts I make here or for other bits of content I think are worth sharing or backing up. Initially this would be on neocities, but I'd like to switch over to self-hosting at some point. I've already got some ideas on how to avoid the mistakes I made the first time, but if anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.

>Something simple that could serve as mirror for any effortposts I make here or for other bits of content I think are worth sharing or backing up

Pure static for like neocities, I'd probably do something like this:

build out a presentational framework, probably in a 2 column format. I'd have something like a titlebar div across the top, a "main" horizontal navbar div just under that, and then 2 columns as floated divs. Maybe a footer div under that, but whatever.

Both of the column divs would be populated with iframes. one would be for viewing content, the other for sub-section navigation.

when I click a link in nav.main across the top, it should populate one iframe with the subnavigation menu for individual articles under that topic category. the links in the subnav.iframe would populate the content viewing iframe with the content document. These content docs would be VERY bare bones HTML documents, probably something no more complex than what can be put out with a markdown editor automatically (this let's you have streamlined content production, since actually writing HTML for an article is tedious and slows your content production workflow pretty badly).

For filestructure, under the www-root, I'd have my index.htm, my stylesheet, and any graphical elements needed for the index. Additionally, I'd have subdirs for each major category. Under each major category folder, I'd have the subnav.htm page for the directory + the individual articles.

Doing it this way would probably minimize unnecessary reduplication of HTML and let you have a pretty decent content production workflow, all things considered. Your workflow would basically be: bang out an article in markdown -> export to HTML -> drop it in a folder and add a link to an existing document to publish it. Most of your heavy lifting would be on day one designing the initial framework + the CSS.


Self hosted, I'd throw this ridiculous rube goldberg shit out the window and make something with PHP and mysql.

 

[shinobu]

What, in your guys' opinion, is the secret to making an interesting old-school static website that people will want to look at more than once? How should it be designed, and what kind of content suits the format best?

I'm also making my own site, and what I noticed is that we have two main components that make up a site: Layout and content. They can be connected (a pixel art style for a pixel artist's website or a pixel art tutorial page) or disconnected (a recipe site with a steampunk style). The average internet user 20 years ago frequented a site mostly for the content. For example, you have a game developer's blog where he documents tips or devlogs, maybe posting some utility code that you can use, which is what kept people coming back. But since this is a hypothetical blog 20 years ago, that guy's site probably has a simple-and-to-the-point aesthetic, or a cool-as-fuck layout.
Then there were websites of website designers whose site was their portfolio, and they usually had wacky logos, vector based designs, maybe they were made entirely in Flash with no HTML.

That was then, and now is now. You can make people return by hosting games you make (almost all engines allow you to compile to javascript/wasm). You can have a killer blog in your area of work. But I think trying to control what your visitors will do is pretty futile. What I'm trying to do is just make the best possible site I can make that aligns with my vision.

From what you posted it seems like you're on the content side, but it's good to give a little thought to layout. There's many websites that I return to just to look at how they look (or looked, before they changed to a worse style)

 

[gsyme]

I'm also making my own site, and what I noticed is that we have two main components that make up a site: Layout and content.

If we really really want to deep dive into this, you can divide things up even further...

HTML has 3+1 categories of elements that are possible:

- structural (shit like div, span, p, etc...tells the browser about the structure of the document)
- semantic (tells the browser what something is, like quote, h1, etc)
- (deprecated) presentational (used to tell the browser how shit looks)
- (lol, pls don't) non-standard (does whatever you make it do in CSS; sorta reinvents non-existent presentational tags; best use case is really to re-invent the <blink> tag using CSS animations)

Since we're on this side of 1999, presentational elements are no longer really to be used, and instead CSS should be used. In radical cases, it should be the only thing used for presentation. CSS zen garden shows a good example of this: https://www.csszengarden.com/
The site's HTML only applies structure and semantics; all of the other stuff for each layout is 100% CSS.

So: HTML for structure/semantic labelling, CSS for presentation.

From here, we can talk about web application architecture.

In a modern web app, we can think of there being three layers (you can also have multiple tiers, but that's has to do with how many machines are actually hosting the layers):

- the application layer -- i.e. the client side stuff that presents the content to the user. This would be HTML/CSS, but also things like your JS, historically flash, etc. Note that even with scripts, all the client actually receives is the final HTML/CSS output, which should be the brainchild of the UX designer, not the PHP dev or whoever.
- the logic layer -- i.e. your scripts. These take input from the database layer and output to the application layer.
- the database layer -- This stores the content that gets formatted by the logic layer and displayed by the application layer.

Obviously, in this model, your raw content needs to be segregated away from the other elements of the website -- it isn't the structure or presentation, it isn't logic, and it isn't the database. It has to be able to pass through all of these layers and readily be processed by each, but it isn't any single one of them. It's just something that gets used and processed by the others.

Keeping this segregation also has the benefit of creating distinct and efficient workflows for each task:

- the content creator can focus on the most efficient means to make content
- the UX designer can focus on making the best looking front end
- the PHP dev can focus on making efficient code
- the database architect can focus on optimizing data structures queries so that the backend is fast

Now then, for a personal site, you're obviously going to be wearing all of these hats, but by compartmentalizing these items thusly, you end up having 4 very efficient workflows rather than one big clusterfuck process that stifles your ability to get anything done and leads to the project getting abandoned like so many "under construction" neocities sites.

With static sites, we obviously don't have the same tech stack to make this so efficient, but we can still perform the same compartmentalization. We should have the goal to create structures that:

1. seperate the content from the architecture.
2. present request options and retrieval output to the user
3. process retrieval requests and retrieve the content
4. store the content in a regular manner that allows it to be retrieved

In static-land, we can devise some crazy ersatz structures to accomplish this for us:

1. can be accomplished by simply isolating your content entirely from the rest of the site's structures. For example, if you have a blog, your article content should ONLY consist of the html elements necessary for structuring a document like paragraphs, headings, tables, lists, images, etc. You could even go further; for example, I write all of my content in markdown (which is much faster than HTML to draft with, and so results in a shorter turn around for article writing), and in static-land, I'd simply export as HTML and end up with a document that consists of NOTHING other than the necessary <p>s and <h1>s and suchlike that's needed for structuring the document.

2. can be accomplished by simply doiing what you do for front end design. HTML/CSS, JS, or whatever else.

3. This can be accomplished by incorporating frames (oldschool but might break in the near future and isn't as good for segregating the different layers of this framework) or iframes (modern, and much better to incorporate into an HTML/CSS layout that's segregated from this layer) into site with some cleverly designed navigation and sub-navigation tables. You can see inklings of this way of thought even in old sites. For example, H.R. Giger's official site (which hasn't had it's layout update in decades) is a classic frameset site that has a navigation frame and a content frame. https://hrgiger.com/ Like most old sites, it blends sub-navigation with content, which I'd say could be improved on, but it hits the nail on the head as an example of what I'm on about -- you have a system of requesting very simple, segregated content pages and then it displays them without the content necessarily being part of the structure of the site (they are because the content on that site uses the content pages as sub-navigation, but whatever).

4. is simply whatever regular conventions you decide to use to structure your www-root and it's sub folders to store the content in a way that's predictable.

Doing it this way is ad-hoc and goofy, but so is eschewing server-side technology... but it would work and still let you have the efficient workflows necessary to streamline site operations and content production.

Sorry if this is a bit rambly and even possibly useless, but this stuff has been on my mind a lot recently lol.

 

[Eden]

I'm closing in on my first year of having started my site. I've considered redesign at least 3 times since. I've thankfully never pursued that thought further. I haven't just been building my site in that time, I've also been exploring the personal sites of others. Like any hobby, few are the truly committed. It's not easy. But I believe that, for a significant majority, they are making it harder on themselves. Personally, I had things to share, I didn't really care how they looked. So my website is written on top of a theme / template. I mostly deal with the content of my site rather than its code. I am happier this way, and I believe quite a few others could be as well.

Please, don't misunderstand, however. You have the time and skills to make your own nice-looking style? Incredible, more power to you. But I do not think a sort-of gatekeeping should occur because of it. Particularly when I believe that the main aspect of a website is content. You made a really nice-looking site, spent a lot of time on how it looks, and now you're tired, or worse, you just realized "Uhhh, what do I write about?" I'm generalizing, but a non-insignificant # of personal websites suffer from this problem. What do you have to say? What do you want to share? Is it just your choice of color palette / collection of 90's styled GIFs?

I use Hugo Static Site Generator. It is NOT perfect. Sometimes I feel like I'm casting literal magic spells and searching the digital lands for esoteric incantations. But it's allowed me to focus on my content. WordPress is bulky and bloated and perhaps a little sad. It's probably easier, though, and will also allow you to focus on your content. If you're connecting with what I'm saying, BearBlog could also be a viable option that lets you focus on your content. My recommendation if you consider yourself "Techie" is to give this a shot: Hugo Themes.

I wish it were easier to acquire, develop and maintain one's own personal digital space online. But if you want the autonomy it brings, the ability to be unconcerned with something like a site moderator. If you want to break away from the considerably awful (imo) social media sites. If you want to truly share who you are, what you care about, the things you've made; if you want it enough, you can do it.

 

[CahCaw]

I would totally show you but it's got some information I don't want linked to my agora road account if that makes sense ;P

can't you share screenshots of the parts that don't have your info on it?

 

[jaedaen]

Back in the day, this is how you had to do it. We looked down on geocities users (though this is pretty smug to be fair, og nerds felt like normies were invading their space back in the day). If you wanted your own website that didn't have some other url that wasn't affiliated with you, you:

1) bought a cool domain name. Plenty of options for this, though there are more domain squatters on the cooler site names nowadays.
2) bought a vm from some provider. I have a linode that costs me 5 bucks a month. That's like a quarter of a 4k netflix subscription now... it shouldn't be too prohibitive for most people that have a computer at least (i wouldn't think).

Then, you learn apache (now do nginx) on a very basic level and get your baseline site up. Finally, you learn how to do some front end stuff. It all depends on what you want to do with it. You want to yell your opinions in to the world, that's great. Just have some nice CSS up like gsyme talks about. Want to make agora road extra funky edition, great. download phpbb and learn how to mod it by teaching yourself php (seems like this site is pretty custom). Want to make a page about how the government is sending penis shrinking rays in to you? Go nuts. Your website will be so small that you can really say anything. If you get big, and your opinions are controversial, you may have people try to ddos you, and you'll have to get cloudflare or something set up, but you can worry about that later.