Neko

website creation process

i made the decision to re-design my website after i grew tired of my previous simple design. i wanted the new design to achieve a few things, namely showing some personality and introducing more content. with my limited coding knowledge, i took to vscode to begin the process.

at first, i messed around with different layouts to test the waters. i had a few prototypes on a single-column page until i realised there was only so much i could fit in. i tried styling different sidebars and hated them all until i finally settled on the sidebars i'm using now.

after i settled on the layout, i organised the content. i took inspiration from other websites and added the standard fare you normally see, such as a status box and webrings. for pages, i just added whatever i could think of at the time. i'm not sure if i'm entirely happy with it right now, so the content may change in the future. but for now, i'm happy with the result.

i've been dabbling in web development since i was a kid. i'm not particularly good at it and my knowledge of the fundamentals is quite lacking. however, i know enough to get by thanks to invaluable tools such as w3schools and the official mdn docs.

ramblings

originally my website was just a simple page with links and descriptions. it actually looked like this for several years, in varying colour schemes.

while the most recent version of my website was functional and did its job, i felt it lacked something. i was also annoyed at myself for using an LLM to port it over to eleventy. i prided myself on coding my stuff by hand, regardless of how shoddy the work was. using generative code in my opinion is a bad practice and you don't learn anything from it.

let me make a clear distinction here. if you use the help of an LLM to help you learn coding practices and help you understand how to do things, i think that's absolutely fine. let's be real, it's like a very targeted search engine in that regard.

it's not easy to code a website when you have no experience in doing so. the people who shout from their soapboxes about how websites must be completely hand-coded to contribute in this space as a whole are ignorant and gate-keeping. if you want to use a cms like wordpress, a site-builder like wix/weebly, or whatever, use it. tailor it and customise it how you want. if it helps you create a website that you love, then that's all that matters in the end.