I’ve been running my own personal website for over 15 years now. It has been a fun learning experience, and an opportunity to share my work and get to know a ton of amazing people.
And I’d like to help others to do the same without needing to learn how to manage servers or be a rock star programmer.
All of the resources below are free to use, some offering paid upgrades. The one thing you will have to pay money for, and is completely optional, is buying your own domain (I personally use porkbun.com and highly recommend them.)
I hope you’ll find this list useful, and be sure to let me know if there’s anything I should add.
Learn the basics
- Blake Watson will teach you how to make a website with HTML (and inspired me to put together this list!)
- learn to style HTML using CSS, and get some practice with a fun game
- dive into JavaScript
- make sure your site is accessible to everyone
Host your website
- Neocities is bringing back the lost individual creativity of the web with free static web hosting
- Glitch gives you “fast, fun tools” for building the website of your dreams, or a blog
Get inspired
- personalsit.es
- deadsimplesites.com
- ooh.directory
- whimsical.club
- HTTPoetics Anthology
- Happy Hues to find a nice palette for your site
- learn about the web we’ve (never) lost
Grow your website
- add a humans.txt file that shows who made your website
- add a “now” page
- add a blogroll
- join a webring
- and a 100 more things you can do
More tools and resource
- My own Simple Page Builder App is a bit of an experiment, an exploration of WYSIWIG (“what you see is what you get”) tools with free hosting services (here’s more about this app on my blog)
- For setting up automation, see Pipedream or Cheap Bots, Toot Sweet!
Inspired by @bw's "HTML for People"*, I'm putting together a short list of resources for making and keeping the web free, open, and poetic.
https://stefanbohacek.com/blog/resources-for-keeping-the-web-free-open-and-poetic/