You should make a personal website

Let's be honest... The modern web sucks!

You read the main title. I'm not talking about some professional website, whipped up in Wix or Squarespace. I'm talking about good ol' HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Nowadays, website design and development has lost its magic. There are many freemium tools people use to create a website. Don't get me wrong, the result looks nice, however, all that you've accomplished has been abstracted away by dashboards, frameworks, plug-ins, etc., and you're probably severely limited in the features you can add to your website, unless you pay a subscription for some plug-in you have no idea how it works, and will probably break your website next month, due to an update from a random plug-in developer. Back in the 90s, when Web 1.0 was still around, everyone who had access to dial-up internet, and a home PC would write their own websites from scratch in plain HTML. Yes, the website looked like crap, but it was yours. You created it from the ground up in Notepad, or any other plain text editor of your choice. It was fun, it was original, it was full of soul and personality. Where has it all gone? Even if you aren't using a website builder, you're probably a developer setting up some bloated development environment using Node.js, NPM, Vite, React, and more... Just to render a static website with some images, links, and buttons! The world of web development has become a bloated mess, but also a soulless mess. Every website looks the same. Every website is screaming with this stereotypical "modern" UI, animations, oversized images and text. Everything loads slower. Computers have become more powerful than ever, yet we are struggling to render a webpage, because it is spammed with ads, slow plug-ins, backend code which is doing who-knows-what. And why does every freakin' website require me to make some silly account? Why not cut straight to the meat and potatoes? You know how I'm writing this very blog post? I'm not doing it from a CMS like WordPress. I'm writing this baby in VS Code in plain HTML! Simple, fast, reliable, and it gets the job done... for free, I might add! And once I'm done writing this blog post, I'm gonna go to my feed.xml file, and add this blog post to my RSS feed, and drag and drop the updated files and folders to my static web host of choice. Boom! Simple. No logging into proprietary dashboards, no purchasing plug-ins that accomplish what I can do in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript for free... Just pure simplicity.

So how can you get started by making and publishing your own website on the World Wide Web?

Here's a list of things you need:

A domain name (Optional. There are free subdomains, like the one my website is using).
A web host. This is a... well... website which serves your website online for everyone to see. I know, it sounds funny that in order to serve your website online, you need another website to do it. You can use GitHub Pages, Surge.sh, Neocities, Nekoweb, Hostinger, etc. etc. There are many options out there, but I recommend GitHub Pages. If you are really into the retro aesthetic, you like art, and overall quirkiness, then Neocities is your best bet.
A computer.
A willingness to learn something new.
A source to learn some HTML.

Don't worry about learning CSS or JavaScript yet. First get the basics down with HTML. Think of HTML as the structure of your website. CSS serves as the styling. JavaScript serves as a way for you to implement advanced interaction features. But you don't need CSS or JavaScript to get something out there online. Yes, your website will look ridiculously basic, but you'll have something functional. Here's a basic HTML template which you can use:


<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">

<head>
    <meta charset="UTF-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0">
    <title>Your Awesome Website</title>
    <link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/images/your-website-icon.png">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="/styles/styles.css">
</head>

<body>

    <header>
        <img src="/images/your-website-logo.png" alt="">
        <nav>
            <ul>
                <li><a href="/index.html">Home</a></li>
                <li><a href="/index.html">About</a></li>
                <li><a href="/index.html">Blog</a></li>
                <li><a href="/index.html">Contact</a></li>
            </ul>
        </nav>
    </header>

    <main>
        <section>
            <h1>There can only be one h1 tag per webpage.</h1>
            <h2>h2 tags serve as headings, which can be used multiple times per webpage.</h2>
            <p>p tags are for text content.</p>
            <h2>This is another h2 heading.</h2>
            <p>This is some more text content</p>
            <p>section tags are used to group a bunch of related content together</p>
            <a href="https://a-website.com/">This is an anchor tag. This allows you to create links to other websites,
                or links to pages within your own website.</a>
        </section>

        <section>
            <h2>This is another heading, but also another section of the webpage, which contains content unrelated to
                the content above.</h2>
            <p>This is some more text content.</p>
        </section>
    </main>

    <footer>
        <p>This is usually where your copyright text goes, as well as some social media links. Maybe add a "back to top"
            link here.</p>
    </footer>
</body>

</html>

Now this is far from a website you'd normally see, but this serves as the backbone of any website - even the ones that look super-duper fancy. Feel free to mess around with this piece of HTML code. But if you want to get deeper, and learn everything there is to make yourself a digital home, then take a look at some of these resources:

Where am I going with this blog post?

I just really want people to get that spark of imagination once again - to create something for themselves online (Without using an unsatisfying web builder). Not all websites have to be this soulless, bloated, corporate thing. You can make a personal blog, upload your art, share your unfiltered opinions, etc. Make your digital home.