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Everyone Should Make a Website

Posted: May 28, 2024

The web is a beautiful thing. Or, at least, it was. Nowadays it's mostly full of massive corporate data collectors masquerading as public services, but there are still some holdouts out there who never ditched their personal sites and, more importantly, some who have painstakingly created gorgeous personal sites in our age of instant gratification and effortless user experience.

Now I wouldn't consider my site gorgeous by any metric, but I made it, and that's what really matters. Before being inevitably corrupted by capital, the web was a place where many expressed themselves through their personal websites, but since the inception of social media as we know it today the personal website has become a lost art form for most, which is truly saddening. To me, there's nothing that compares to viewing someone's website. It's as if fragments of their souls are carefully weaved into the hypertext, each page a glimpse into their mind on full display in an infinitely vast museum.

This movement to re-humanize the World Wide Web is referred to by many different names and carried forth by vastly differing principals (some even vowing to adhere rigidly to decades-old web standards), but what adheres them all together is advocacy for websites as the base unit of online socialization. Many personal sites you find across the web will be linked to other sites sharing one or more similar themes through webrings. This, along with other technologies considered antiquated by many such as guestbooks, leads small, friendly communities to form as opposed to the large and largely hostile cesspools of the major social media platforms. No matter what you want to call it, this movement to revitalize the web is one I am extremely grateful to have in my life and to be a part of.

Make no mistake, this is not something that you have to be a techie or a graphic designer to get into and enjoy. Everyone is capable of learning HTML and CSS, and I firmly believe that everyone should make a website.

There are many ways one could go about it, but I recommend starting at NeoCities. Inspired by the late GeoCities, NeoCities provides free and easy-to-use web hosting. You can do everything from within your browser, and they even have their own tutorials to help you get started on your journey. Another good resource I'd recommend to anyone interested in learning to create their own website is W3Schools's HTML and CSS tutorials, which were instrumental in my own education.

One of my favorite things about creating websites is that you can see how others have made their website using your browser's built-in web developer tools. You can access them by typing ctrl+shift+i (or command+shift+i if you're on a Mac). You should be able to see the HTML, CSS, and Javascript on the site, and once you know enough to understand what's going on, you can take note of interesting or useful things others do on their sites and apply them to yours.

Your first website probably won't look very good. I'm not saying that to be mean, just know that web design is a continuous process of learning, both from one's own mistakes and from others who are more experienced. What matters most is getting started with it in order to break past the initial difficulties to uncover a fun and unique method of self-expression and communication. Get out there, make websites, join webrings, and make friends. Together, we can make the web a more fun and interesting place.