Website Transferred and How it Went

Originally Posted 3/30/24

Neocities Icon. A cartoon face of an orange cat in a hard hat holding a wrench in one paw, and a paintbrush in another.

I'm putting out this post to mention that at this point the site has been fully brought over to neocities. I just finished implementing the RSS feeds, and that was the last big thing I wanted before viewing the site as "done". I do still need to work on making the site more mobile friendly though.

The other thing though is I also wanted a place to sort of talk about how it went, and any pieces of advice I could mention for those looking to do the same thing.

Where is the Site Now?

The site is now hosted on Neocities. Neocities is basically a platform where you can host your own website. They offer a built in editor and some resources to learn how to make your own website. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it, you'll have to make the site from using HTML and CSS (or, at least, coding the site from scratch). There is no visual editor for neocities. If you're interested in just browsing Neocities, This link should allow you to do so. Here is a cohost post about Neocities.

Why did you choose Neocities?

For me personally, I looked around at the other website builders and the pricing turned me off. This website is a hobby for me. I used to use it as a sort of resume, but that's no longer needed. As such, the site doesn't have to look pristine. Because of that, it didn't really make sense to me to pay monthly for something that I simply didn't need, and I'm not making money on. Neocities though is only $5 per month for 50 GB of storage. I was also already somewhat familiar with HTML starting this project, so figured I could figure out the rest as I went along.

Do you recommend other people use Neocities to host their sites?

If you are not techy, or interested in learning HTML and CSS, no. The average person I think would be better served using something like Wix or Squarespace. There was a lot of this project that I was only able to complete due to having friends who also knew coding, and could provide support. I think for the average person, this is a bit much for what they'd be looking to do with a website.

That said, if you are interested in learning coding at all, I think HTML is a pretty digestible language to start with. Even CSS has a certain logic to it that once it clicked I was like "oh, this is actually pretty straight forward". The toughest part is just knowing what to tell the computer to get it to do what you want it to. There also seems to be just a lot of ways you could end up hitting your head against the wall trying to figure out why something isn't working with your CSS code. If you're unfamiliar, HTML would be the website itself, and CSS tells web browsers how the website should look.

Do you have any tips for people looking to code their own sites?

Yeah so W3 Schools has a ton of good information about how to use HTML or CSS or honestly a lot of other coding things too. I found the guides Neocities links to especially helpful too.

If you're not already, using Visual Studio to code has been incredibly helpful. I find its autofill function annoying sometimes, but overall a huge step up from Notepad++.

In general, Google and ChatGPT can be very helpful with learning the basics.

Conclusion

Honestly this experience for me has been largely enjoyable. Being able to fully customize a website to how I like it has been cool. Being able to point to something and be like "I built that myself" is pretty wonderful. There have been a ton of moments that have been frustrating, and needing to really be thorough with coding can be tough at times. Honestly the biggest issue I ran into was trying to figure out how to display code in the Instructional posts I make. Ultimately I went with using textarea rather than codeblock if anyone else runs into that issue. Even things like RSS Feeds weren't that bad with a bit of Googling.

Overall my thoughts are if this is something you're interested in learning, then go for it because it's pretty approachable. If you're not into coding, and are just looking to have a basic website to present your resume or information about you, then I think it's better going with a website builder instead.

Let me know if you have any thoughts, questions, or suggestions on either this post or how to make this site better overall! Reach out to steventanzimedia@gmail.com. Thanks for reading!