How to get specific help with website Stuff?

[KittyTheKat]

Hey all! I'm working hard (in some meaning of the word hard) on my website, but sometimes I have very specific questions that are difficult to find answers to and I'd rather not spam this or any other forum with posts about them.
For a few examples:

• How do I make a persistent navigation sidebar across my pages?
• Where can I find good resources for geocities-style images and gifs?
• How do I set up a blog on my site?

...and so on.
Is there a platform you'd recommend where I can ask some questions like that without being annoying about it? Sometimes they're possible to find answers to myself, but I know that there are plenty of people who know these things already so I'm curious if there's a better way to go about learning this stuff.

[wygolvillage]

To make the navbar persistent you'll want to put it in a style sheet and link it to all your pages.

For Geocities graphics you might like the page gifcities from the Internet Archive which is basically a gif based search engine for the archived Geocities pages.

There are a lot of different ways to make a blog but the simplest method (the one I use at least) is to just update a specific page with text whenever I want to post something. I also have an RSS feed for it if people want to stay notified on it. There are some other tools for more complex blog systems though, it's worth looking around if you want something more intricate.

[BananaBoots]

I can't particularly help with the first two but I use Zonelets for my own blog. It's pretty easy to set up and use (to me, at least) and I think my blog looks super cool! There's not much in the way of posts but this is my blog if you want to see what Zonelets looks like in practice. I hope you find answers to the first two questions!

[akesi]

I think it's fine to ask for help here, though I'd check to see if your question has already been asked. The second question, for instance, about good sources for geocities gifs -- I imagine that could be a thread that's useful for a lot of people.

For setting up a navbar, you have a lot of options. You could use a static site generator like Jekyll that lets you make different html snippets that can easily be re-used on multiple pages (might be complicated if you're just starting out, but imo makes things more convenient long term). Or you could try using iframes, which lets you load an HTML page in another HTML page. Or you could use some kind of javascript solution.

I'd also recommend gifcities and zonelets!

[Melooon]

How do I make a persistent navigation sidebar across my pages?

How do I set up a blog on my site?

So both of these are great questions that come up a lot; but they are also hard to answer becouse there are BILLIONS of ways you can do these and none of them are the right or wrong choice; its just about finding what suits you best. Of course if you're just starting out you don't know what suits you best; so I would actually suggest trying a few options and seeing how they feel.

For the Nav BAR:
The simplest way is using frames or iFrames - the absolute simplest is using Frameset (you can look at my homepage to see a typical frameset style site) - we actually have a guide on the wiki here for this.

You can use also iFrames for a more modern look, but requires you to put the iframe on every page correctly. In this case; you just make your nav as a separate html file, then put an iframe on every page showing that same nav page.
(We should really have a proper guide on the wiki!!)

An alternative iFrame system is to have a main content iframe, and a nav iframe both on one single index page (this is actually more like frameset - A well known site using this layout is cinni.net!). The benefit here is that you don't have to duplicate the iframe on every page; but it can also cause some layout issues.

(If you need help with a particular one just ask and Im sure you'll get more specific advice!)

After that you can use JavaScript to load your nav (I don't recommend this). Or you can use a static site generator as akesi says (but if your asking this question, then I don't recommend that as its a big learning curve and not well suited for everyone, particularly beginners)

As for Blogs:
Yep, the simplest way to start is just to put text on a regular HTML page; if you find you like blogging (say you've done about 10 pages/blog posts), then come back and ask again because you'll be in a better position to know what kind of blog you want! (There are MANY options for more complex blogging platforms) 

Where can I find good resources for geocities-style images and gifs?

I link a few on my website guide; but one I forgot to add there is GifCities 


Also to answer your more over arching question... honestly this is one of the best places to ask (along with some of the Neocities discords that exist) - the thing is there are just not that many resources actually dedicated to homepage creation - so you can get lots of tech help; but for actual homepage questions, most of us learn from copying each other or asking in groups like this!