Screenshot from Allison "A.N." Lucas's website
Remember old internet? No, not old old, but the one we had in the late 90s and early 00s. When everyone and their cats had a cool homepage with rotating gifs, cheesy backgrounds and visitor counters? Sites hosted in Angelfire and Geocities. Might be your cookie cutter nostalgia talking, but I loved browsing those sites, full of wacky and weird and interesting stuff.
Screenshot from Allison "A.N." Lucas's website
Luckily I am not alone in this longing for more varied and colourful internet. Neocities, a modern version of Geocities, is filled with rad sites you can browse for inspiration and good ol' world wide web fun. And most importantly, they make it super easy for anyone to set up a personal website.
Sadgrl has a great Beginner's tutorial on how to set up the site in Neocities, so I won't be talking about that in this series. They also have a Layout Maker for easy generation of html & css files, with few basic options like sidebar amount, header size and so on. Check also the Learn-section in Neocities. They have their own HTML course there, and links to various resources.
From those links, you will find everything you need to get the site up and running. In the following posts, I'm going to show few things that can help with building and maintaining the site.
Setting up a personal site or a blog is made extremely easy with modern services like Wordpress and Wix. So why would someone want to go at it the hard way?
For me, all those tools feel way too bloated, full of features I'm never going to use. And they take away some of the ownership of the site. Maybe not in any legal way, but in technical and personal sense. And with automation and templates designed for modern web, it's easy to make nice and clean but bland and lifeless sites. In their About page, Neocities states their goal as:
"To enable you to harness the creativity, beauty, and power of creating your own web site. To rebuild the web we lost to automation and monotony, and make it fun again."
I don't know about you, but I think that's just what the internet desperately needs.