Please share tools/tips/platforms for making a personal website
I figured that more than complaining about the dearth of random and weird websites, I might ought to contribute something. I almost went to MassArt for new media installations. In those days I was a web monkey with a solid design bent and very orthogonal thinking. I still have a smidgeon of the thinking, we'll see what I have left of my design skills, but my tech skills are hopeless. Back then my tools were freehand, dreamweaver, bbedit, photoshop, flash, Perl, Solaris, mySQL. My last website was done with rudimentary css.
I would like to get right to the design and expression phase, I don't have an inclination to dive into coding. I also don't want to worry about security. I'll throw a few bucks down.
I'm still comfortable in photoshop, but would like a more fun tool. I cannot stand illustrator, and would love to have a vigorous chat with the folks at Adobe who chose to promote it and shelve freehand. Better yet, an even more vigorous chat with the moron at the FTC who approved Adobe's buyout of macromedia. You can bet that will be on the website. Is there any equivalent to freehand? I saw the post about a free, online illustration tool that came through recently, that might be a smidge rudimentary. What about dreamweaver? And how to publish? I don't care to learn about content management, scripting, databases, etc. if I can avoid it.
Bonus if there are AI tools to help.
Depending on the kind of site you want to make, a static site generator would be pretty simple. I haven't used any, but I believe the most popular one is hugo. Basically all you do is write some markdown files, pick a theme, and it generates a site for you.
If you're looking to contribute to random and weird websites I do recommend learning CSS again. It's only gotten easier and more powerful: you should look into flexbox in particular, which greatly simplifies a lot of common designs that used to be hard to implement in the past. I think Interneting is Hard is a quite good tutorial and CSS Tricks has always been an excellent reference. But if you're not interested in learning CSS or want a more WYSIWYG interface, there's this (social media?) site called Multiverse that's centred around making particularly expressive and stylized web pages. I haven't tried it out, but their examples look quite well done: and I believe they produce raw, quite readable and idiomatic HTML which you then could edit further.
As for hosting: Neocities is fun, free, and filled with sites to take inspiration from. It's very easy to use, you just upload .html and .css files and whatever assets you may need, and they're instantly served (and can be edited directly with a builtin editor). Github Pages is also free and forever but there's more of a learning curve.
There really isn't any noncommercial no-code website builders out there. There are things like Squarespace and Wix, but AFAIK you will be limited to using their overpriced hosting solutions.
The good thing is that the code you learned when you were younger is good enough to get started. The web grows iteratively and so there are simply more tools in the toolbox for you to use. That being said, you'll probably want to brush up on your CSS because that's where the real design power comes from.
The biggest change from the dreamweaver days to today in terms of design is that we have much more advanced layout tools (and best of all, they actually work in every browser! Mostly); you should no longer be using tables to align things on the page. If you want to have things in a grid that are not tables, there is an entirely different layout engine you can use called grid. You should also generally avoid using pixel sizes in favor of using relative measurements like em, vw and %.
One of the reasons why there aren't too many no-code solutions these days is because the tools around code are pretty fantastic these days; almost every browser out there has it's own version of DevTools built into them. Don't get too overwhelmed with all the things it does; all you need to know about for the purpose of design is the Inspector tab, which will allow you to directly alter the DOM directly with HTML and CSS syntax, and even has nice features like color pickers built in.
For illustrations, you have tons of options. Inkscape is a great open source vector drawing tool, and if you want something more mixed-media there's Krita. If you are willing to pay for software, Affinity Designer is absolutely fantastic; I honestly wouldn't recommend any other proprietary option. It's also relatively inexpensive, doesn't have a subscription, and there's an equally fantastic iPad version.
Hosting is the easiest problem to solve. Someone else already mentioned Github Pages. You can also host static content on Amazon S3 for pennies. There are tons of other options out there if you just look.
To be fair to them Squarespace isn't particularly overpriced, for what you get. Their personal plan costs almost the same as what I pay for a bottom-end Linode VM and the time saved in not having to set up and maintain a whole system, let alone dick about writing actual HTML/etc, is probably well worth the extra £2 a month for a lot of people. If you pay annually it's even cheaper.
That said, if you want to do much more than a portfolio/blog style site then I don't think Squarespace is ideal. I'm not sure how much you can do if you want to do things their templating system hasn't thought of.
Just as an aside, I remember once in the very early 2000s, while riding a night bus home, me and a friend planned out a service almost exactly like Squarespace then got distracted by other projects and never got around to making it. I made a proto-Instagram and he made a proto-Google Analytics and neither of us got bought out by the big boys. Meanwhile Squarespace had almost a billion dollars in revenue over the last year. And here I am, avoiding putting the heating on until the thermometer hits single figures..
Ok, I did it!
https://noblepath.neocities.org
My original conception was to have the letter rotating at different sizes and colors, but in the same location. Serendipitously, I forgot to close the <span>'s and an earlier version of this came out.
Can't figure why it won't change the colors properly, a limitation nesting inline-block elements?
Also, if I don't inlclude the inital transform:rotate in the span.class it won't animate. And, if I don't set the initial rotation at (359deg), it won't go all the way around and does all kind of janky stuff. This is the case even for a single <span>.
Nevertheless, this was fun as heck, I intend to keep developing. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions! I used firefox devtools, CotEditor, interneting is hard, css-tricks, w3 schools, devtools docs, linuxhints, stackexhange, neocities, and of course, google.
Edit: I put the css in the html file because scrolling felt easier than switching tabs at this stage. Clearly, that's not any solution for a decently complex project.
Eh, I write a lot of my single-page websites with the css in the html. Only having to move around one file is nice.
also i love it!
As far as the hosting itself goes, I'm pretty happy with connecting a GitHub repo to a Netlify-hosted website. But that seems like a more programmer-oriented solution.
There is always GitHub Pages as an option too.
For low coding, there's still the old stuff like hosted wordpress.
The new hotness is probably Squarespace in this area. Never used it, it's a little sus that they seem to spend the GDP of a small nation on podcast and youtube advertisements, but I do know actual human beings that use it so it's probably fine if nothing else.
There isn't that much that's low code. There's a lot of stuff for at least hobbyist level people that like to tinker, but with all the platforms (social media, things like substack for writing, things like shopify for stores), it's taken a lot of the oxygen out of the area of personal websites for laymen.
I'd give squarespace a shot. I swear to god I'm not saying that because of brain rot from advertisement spam. Probably.