blog
how i made a website
DATE may 2026
i'm always intimidated by people who know how to work computers, but website design turned out to be much faster than i thought. i want to link the resources i used and my design process, in case anyone else could benefit from what i've learned!
resources
- neocities: a quasi-social media site where you can host html websites like this one. it's free, and funded by donations.
- petrapixel's layout generator: this site template allows you to add headers, footers and sidebars, and to use javascript to load them automatically on every page. or you could just rip someone else's source code lol
- text editor: i have a copy of my website on my own computer, and i edit everything on notepad++ (visual studio code is also good). i click and drag any files that i've changed to neocities every few minutes.
- neocities rss feed: i used this guide to set up a rss feed for the website. this is a text file where you can add updates for other people to pull to their rss reader.
- confidence: once you have a tutorial or a template to work from, just start editing things! check the website regularly as you make changes. if you break something and you don't understand it well enough to fix it, hit undo and try again.
design goals
here are some things i wanted my site to be, and what i did to try to achieve those goals.
- easy to maintain: i used a simple font and only a few colours, so that i can just bang out plain text to add more content whenever i like without having to micromanage the theme. i also put all the theme stuff in the .css file, so i can edit it all at once.
- cosy: i avoided flashing gifs for most of it, since i find those a bit overwhelming (sorry). i also think the consistent header, footer, sidebar, and background image help to "wall in" each page, so that the whole site feels like you're in one enclosed place.
- alive and connected: i put dates on everything, so that it's clear when content is new. i also added a sidebar, so that you can see some up-to-date content there even if you're on an older page. when people are done, they can use the links to continue on their journey and find new things, instead of it being a dead end.
- a little whimsical: to balance out the relatively dry design choices, i added some stars and sparkles and made sure it had lots of pictures.
overall, i think i hit all these goals! so i'm done with tinkering for now. in the future i want to add some more pizazz to the gallery, but for now i'm trying to avoid being a perfectionist.
i don't want to make this a website about websites (a meta-website?), so this will probably be my last post about this. i'll just edit this post if i have anything to add later!
until next time,
mzw☆
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