What inspired you to create a personal website?

[Memory]

i suppose for me it was cuz social media felt extremely exhausting; i felt pretty burnt out from it - and i really felt the modern web was... far from how it could be, i guess. for a lack of a better term.
i ended up with Neocities for a bit, but over time i ended up on Nekoweb as i felt Neocities didn't quite feel like it hit the same way? idk. Nekoweb just feels more like at home for me lol.
especially since it's let me express who i truly am i've kinda finally felt free? if that makes any sense. my whole likes, interests, etc have seemed to mostly form during my later childhood with only few from my teenagehood, so especially because of that, lots of it has gotten me some of the worst responses?
i kinda felt personal sites are just way more chill, it's kinda nice being in my own space that i can control :3

in response to your questions, i've always wanted to make my own personal site (^_^) and i've kinda felt like it's a dream come true lol.
i guess some of the biggest challenges i've faced when making it was primarily CSS and JS, and all the cool things that make a site more lively? hehe. now it looks far different from the start and i'm kinda proud of how far i've come.
in five years, i don't really know? i kinda want it to be more 'deeper' and just fix up the rough edges maybe.

[Malice]

I remember wanting to learn HTML since I was about 11 or 12, but I'd always stop after a bit. I made my Neocities account in 2020 because I liked the idea of having a space for my own and I was also really into the 90s/00s nostalgia-bait at the time. I never really did anything to it until 2022, and I've been keeping up with it regularly since then!

My main challenges have been trying to figure out how to put my ideas into code and also avoiding burnout. Sometimes maintaining a website feels like the two week Minecraft phase but with coding... I'll go awhile without doing anything too substantial, then for a couple of weeks I'll write a bunch of blog posts or in my current case, completely revamp the site. I've been getting better at being consistent, though!

In five years, I think my site would look a bit different as I get better at coding and my tastes change, but the core of it would still be more or less the same. I could see pages being more fleshed out, especially the art and blog sections. Maybe I'll end up making a separate site for my art portfolio/whatever art projects I'm working on?

[Myrmeform]

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?
Like others have said, being a kid on neopets and seeing all the creative petpages people would make. I would marvel at them for hours, eventually very gradually messing with html myself. I would use templates at first and I think that helped me slowly become familiar with html and css. I enjoyed making basic petpages, and on other sites that allowed more creative freedom than an icon and header I enjoyed messing around with it then. Years later, I saw some posts on social media talking about making your own website, linking to yesterweb stuff and neocities. I had no idea there was a free website host so it was exciting finding out about neocities.

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?
Learning html and css haha. It's very hard for me to focus on, its like coding and my brain are the wrong sides of the magnets that push away. I'll have a picture in my head for exactly what I want, and then I search around and find exactly the code that will help me get there, and then fiddling with it for my needs causes my brain to overheat and shut down. It's slow going but it's going!


Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?
I want my photo galleries to be finished, I want my ant pages to be finished, I want to expand my neopets page to feature my neopet ocs, I want to make a flight rising page for my lore and ocs and such, I want to make a page for the music I listen to.... There's so much I want to add. Hopefully in the future it will be much more expansive.

[Arcadia Page]

°What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?°

I was creating webcomics at the time, and I thought it was cool how quite a few other webcomic creators had their own blogs and websites. Then I started dating this guy who also had a blog, and I was like maybe I should give this blog/website thing a try, and I've been doing it ever since. I ended up marrying the guy, btw.

°What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?°

I started with a blogger blog so the challenge was learning how to deeply customize the templates. I actually got pretty good at that. Then later when I moved to a static blog, the challenge was making sure that I could make the transition from blogger without losing my traffic and once again, customizing templates for a very different setup.

°Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?°

Oh my gosh, my website/blog five years from now would be so crazy. I've been posting regularly to my current blog since 2016, so it would be like this really deep archive. I already have a lot of posts. This year I opened myself up to allowing my blog to be a bit more eclectic, leaving space for me to share fiction I'm writing, audio recordings and other things, so I expect that to continue. My blog posts also tend to inspire the books that I write, so it's fun imagining what my backlog is going to be like.

[KiwiMeowo]

Updating my code. I used a lot of <center> and <font> stuff for a good while and after struggling about some HTML, I discovered that some tags were deprecated and I had been using it since the beginning which almost made me want to give up. In the end it's okay to use<center> to be honest, it just sound a bite rude to say "your HTML is garbage, you still use <center> !!!!". So yeah, hands down it's keeping up to date with deprecated tags and stuff. Learning CSS was difficult for me.

<center> is my favourite deprecated tag! It is easier to type this tag than adding style="text-align:center", nobody can get me to quit using it >:3

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?

Back then when I first created my Carrd page, I found expressing myself in a webpage is quite fun. Later on, I heard about Neocities from a friend. I hadn't done HTML since secondary school, but I gave it a shot. With the help of a template, I managed to build a place just for me. Personal sites are very good for self-expression, which most social media couldn't do.

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?

While designing a page, I kept thinking about how to make it look interesting. I feel like there's a lot more I could do with HTML, when I open up a new page, I keep thinking "What creative elements can I put in here so that it isn't just a text page?" I have to balance cool design and accessible layout, which can be difficult to do.

Moreover, one of the most updated section is the blogs, where I ramble about stuff. A great thing about creating this site is that I got to talk about the things I want to talk about without feeling like I'm being ignored by the social media algorithm! But because I yapped too much, I'm actually running out of things to say, for better or worse. I don't really need to rush myself to find topics though, the indie web culture doesn't really promote fast-paced content creation.

Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?

I don't change my index page layout a lot, at least the changes are not large. For my index page, the shift from the initial layout design of my site to the current one was somewhat slow, and the overall style in my mind remains the same. I give more variety to my other pages, I'd imagine my OC pages will look the most different in the future. I have been thinking of redesigning the OC pages since they look a bit bland, I'm still thinking of a good design though...

I do hope I would keep adding new stuff to my site, it is fun to share my art and talk about random stuff. But the things I want to add the most are easter eggs, it is really fun to find hidden secrets in indie sites, though I am not good at finding them. I'm not sure what kind of secrets I should add, so adding them will be a slow process over the years.

[MrsMoe]

Honestly, the main draw of Neocities towards me was the inherent nostalgia. I love the 2000's (especially in terms of the internet) and nostalgiacore, so I loved the idea of having my own site that invoked those vibes. Plus, the majority of mainstream social media is so incredibly rancid to me now that I couldn't take it anymore. Plus plus, I just enjoy having a potential hub for chronicling my personal life, my writing, and my art.

The hardest part about starting my site however, was that I am (or was) completely clueless about coding. I'm really scared to get into hobbies I have no experience with, so diving into HTML took a whiiiiile. Fortunately, I found someone who makes website templates and I learned how to hollow it out and customize it with my own stuff from there. Other than that, I procrastinate a lot when I have to work on an aspect of my site I'm not sure how to layer. I've been putting off my collection page (for blinkies, stamps and transparent stickers) just because I assume getting that stuff to aline perfectly would be too hard.

Turns out it's not. Like, at all.

In at least five years from now, I'd like to my site to be full of neat little gizmos and doodads, like all the best neocities sites. I want that shit decked out with a playlist on the top of the page, a nikki.top widget, and other fun floating elements, and have a full archive of all my musings and paintings and whatever projects I want.

[juanp32]

i got bored and saw people made cool stuff so like maybe ill try and originallly it was just me dumping early beepbox tracks on index page and httpexplained.html buuuut it quickly snowballed into what it is today along with linked pages i manage
the stylesheet on the "myspace" is an example of what i can do at this point...but i kept the very basic css of my site because it had become basically the look the site got associated with, i mean, my site with a different style (like complicated layout and that) just looks wrong to me, its been years of just left aligned text on a single pane lol

then like last june i made https://thatdosserver.codeberg.page originally to host a little project that i basically abandoned after completely ruining it lol so now its just a place where i dump files due to neocities limitations because i cant be assed to move to nekoweb nor have money for the supporter plan lol

[st3phvee]

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?

I was inspired by randomly stumbling upon the IndieWeb wiki earlier this year! I can't remember how I got there, but it was in the context of reminiscing about the way the internet used to be, and thinking wistfully about my Geocities days in the late 90s/early 2000s. I'm SO over social media and all the AI slop that's invading those parts of the internet that are in your face all the time, and honestly didn't think that the Old Net ethos would still exist anywhere other than the Wayback Machine ... it was such a surprise to find that people are still stubbornly out there, creating beautiful, creative sites. And it was so inspiring.

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?

It has actually been really easy! As I've said before, getting back into HTML/CSS after a long 15+ year hiatus is like getting back up on a horse ... except the horse no longer positions everything on a page with <tr> and <td> CSS is soooooo cool now. I'm amazed by everything you can do with it! Border-radius, where WERE you when I was trying to create curved table corners in 2003?!

Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?

I expect it'll look totally different a few months from now, let alone five years. I used to joke back in the day that I suffer from chronic "layoutitis," a crippling, time-consuming compulsion to completely redesign your website's layout every month or two.

[halcybutton]

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?
- i got into making carrds/rentries for information sharing about myself, learning a bit of html there (through carrd, i had a pro membership) before i completely left carrd for neocities, since i had learned enough to have a functional site along with wanting more control over how my site actually looked.

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?
- since i'm disabled it can be very hard to get myself to work on my site in any way after it's fully set up. this also makes it hard to learn more coding to expand my site more and make it more like my vision

Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?
if i don't close it down, i hope it just reflects who i am at that moment rather than trying to cling onto my past. i also hope the code is a lot cleaner and that it's overall just a more pleasant site experience

[Codachrome]

> What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?

i don't remember, but i tried making a site with wix ( ) at the young, young age of like 8, but i couldn't commit.

then, when i was 14, i looked through neocities and found extremely cool sites, and wanted to make one myself. after a  year and around 4 different domains, i ultimately settled down with my current one, Codachrome. i still left up the site i made at 14 btw. idk where the wix one went though, definitely for the better ^^;

> What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?

commitment to a domain. as mentioned before, i went through 4 different sites (fins & fiddles, arisenanew, and web-obelisk, all of which were in neocities). it was mostly due to a 9-year-long burnout caused by school, due to being punished often before i was diagnosed with autism a bit later.
> Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?

i really don't know, to be honest. maybe the aesthetic would change? maybe i'd give it a full redesign? or maybe it will stay the same. the former is definitely more likely though, i like to change things up sometimes

[MediocreMetastasis]

I always knew how to make a website, through my own curiosity and high school programs. But my broke ass didn't want to pay for a web server and domain name. Then I found neocities about a year ago. Boom website!

[ripley]

 hello! this is my first ever post!    hopefully i clicked the right button... lol

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website? i had discovered neocities around the summer of 2024, and saw alot of websites looking creative and downright cool. i decided to learn fully around april the next year and now here i am!

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site? i actually really like html and coding so the learning curve wasn't the challenge for me. my website is still very new, so i think ill face my challenges later with problems with file hosting whenever i mature in that area, or theres problems with the people who host them!

Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like? this is a really hard question! i would like to see my website more cleaner and fun. more trinkets for people to see, like quizzes or fanpages. right now its a bit lacking... but ill get there!   

[lakes]

What inspired you/made you want to create a personal website?

At 1st, ironically, it started as me just wanting a place to link my new socials that wasn't as bland-looking as linktree. I saw people linking to neocities on bluesky and decided to try it. I ended up loving it more than traditional social media.

What are some challenges you've faced in the process of creating and maintaining a site?

One is deciding on whether or not to use third party services/sources for some of the code. I feel like when you're a beginner and you wanna do something more complicated, a lot of people tell you to rely on jquery or a template or something like that. I ended up relying on third party services, but now I'm trying to rely on them less.
 

Imagine your site five years from now (even if you may or may not be running the same site five years down the line, or may have closed it out as a completed project)... What do you think it will look like, or what would you want it to look like?

Maybe I'll add a taskbar to my site or maybe I'll change the look entirely. But it might stay the same. Afterall, I'm kinda lazy.