It's good to stick with tools for making website? (More questions)

[Cco0orn]

So I'm remaking my personal page right now, I use my friend's layout (Which he writes to help me) before I feel guilty and decide to write my own layout code, but reading articles like learn CSS layout is confused me, so I going to melonland to search then found out a tool called layoutit, it helps me to do layout but now I feel unoriginal even I changed the code to my own, now I have two questions:

It's okay to use/stick with tools when creating a webpage?
Where's better sources for learning CSS/HTML and more?

There's my current progress of my webpage, feel free to give feedback and ideas!

[Melooon]

It depends what you want ~ if you use a layout you'll get a more polished site, but as you say it will be another polished clone.

Alternately you can put together a site entirely yourself and it could turn out to be a buggy mess, but you at least have the chance for it to be totally your buggy mess 

I personally don't find template based sites interesting and I don't tend to spend much time on them. I'd much sooner see someone's buggy first attempt than a clean layout someone else made thats been skinned. However, it's your site and you should not be making it based on anyone else's preferences.

You might just be interested in sharing art or text, and in that case the layout may not be important to you so using a template is a good idea. You might also find that studying a layout is a good way to learn, and in some way's it is, and in other ways it is not.

Regrading layoutit - I think grid based sites (the kind it's making for you) are the most confusing kind of site and you wont learn a huge amount from them. You'd be better off looking at some of the layouts linked here like these ones: https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=3574.0 and here https://wiki.melonland.net/free_code_templates

The best way to start is to have no layout at all and just add bits based on what you learn You dont need to use an entire layout, you can just steal bits of it ~ try and copy them out and figure out how they work if you can.
That's not how most people like to work, but it does give the most interesting results! 

[Cco0orn]

It depends what you want ~ if you use a layout you'll get a more polished site, but as you say it will be another polished clone.

Alternately you can put together a site entirely yourself and it could turn out to be a buggy mess, but you at least have the chance for it to be totally your buggy mess 

It's your site and you should not be making it based on anyone else's preferences.

You might just be interested in sharing art or text, and in that case the layout may not be important to you so using a template is a good idea. You might also find that studying a layout is a good way to learn, and in some way's it is, and in other ways it is not.

Thank you for response and answer! Now I'd stick with layoutit's basic layout and edit it to my own style! Also these template websites are looking good, although I love to make my own with layoutit because it only gives basic grid, so I can change whatever I want.

I'm making a personal webpage which based on 1990-2000s asian geocities webpages (Especailly hong kong and japan I guess) like Mag's Sky, Raindow House and Miss V's Home, which are clean and heisei retro-looks, but add long main article page, without pop-up pages.