What drove you guys to make a website?

[NinAcTi0N]

I’m genuinely curious about this one, since each person has a different background on the site making journey ^^

In my case, I discovered Neocities thanks to a friend who mentioned it, and couldn’t help but find the possibility of using coding artistically a mind blowing thing! Still think lol, and tbh, I hope to keep on learning to make even cooler stuff!

I also found Neocities to be quite liberating too... I wanted more flexibility in how I wanted to showcase my art, and being able to code from scratch pretty much changed my view in that :] It’s a whole wild world out there, and Neocities encapsulates that perfectly.

How about you peeps? What pushed you to make a website, and why Neocities?

[mima]

I think it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I remembered one day during class that I had learned some HTML and CSS a few years back, and I thought why not put it to good use? So I looked for places to make a website for free and the rest is history.

[hat]

For this site in particular, I was watching my boyfriend make his fake 1996 website and got excited to make another website for myself.

This one worked out a little bit better than previous ones because I had mutually muted all my twitter "friends" and was shouting all my best jokes into the void there so I just moved my void shouting somewhere else and got equally as large of a dopamine rush from it.

The problem with all my previous sites is that free hosting would remove them if I got less than 10 views in 30 days or something like that. I couldn't get any views to keep it up!! I made my neocities account in 2013 and had a top tier username so I just used that since I never had to worry about no one looking at my site.

[NinAcTi0N]

I think it was a spur-of-the-moment thing. I remembered one day during class that I had learned some HTML and CSS a few years back, and I thought why not put it to good use? So I looked for places to make a website for free and the rest is history.

Hmm, I see! It's super cool you felt like resurrecting that old knowledge you had in coding ^^ I had no idea of HTML and CSS when I hopped into Neocities lol, I set myself off to study both throughout 2-3 weeks x] I didn't even expect to find such joy in it, but here I am!

[NinAcTi0N]

For this site in particular, I was watching my boyfriend make his fake 1996 website and got excited to make another website for myself.

This one worked out a little bit better than previous ones because I had mutually muted all my twitter "friends" and was shouting all my best jokes into the void there so I just moved my void shouting somewhere else and got equally as large of a dopamine rush from it.

The problem with all my previous sites is that free hosting would remove them if I got less than 10 views in 30 days or something like that. I couldn't get any views to keep it up!! I made my neocities account in 2013 and had a top tier username so I just used that since I never had to worry about no one looking at my site.

Oh wow, so you had a view estimate you site should have? That sucks lol, I still remember back when my site was super barebones... I'd gotten 18 views and was already gasping at the number xD I'll admit something too- I felt a very peculiar joy when I was shaping my site to look like an amalgamation of my favorite aesthetics, or to feel like my art was oozing all over it ^^ I have yet to gush over my interests in a shrine corner either lol, maybe someday.

[sanguineroyal]

I'm in my early twenties, so I wasn't really around for the "old web", my experiences with the internet are almost intrinsically intertwined with social media. I'd gone through numerous phases of enjoying certain socmed platforms, accidently becoming too invested in the "culture" and then losing interest due to it becoming unhealthy for me. I'd been aware of neocities due to people using it as a carrd alternative on Twitter, but I didn't really learn more about the small web until my final year of undergrad when I was looking into Neocities as a place to host my art outside of social media constraints.

The more I learned and explored the personal/small web, the more I realized how much I enjoyed being able to carve out my own space on the internet. What initially started as my portfolio site has now become my personal site as well as umbrella domain for all the subdomains that it houses. I didn't start my site expecting web dev to become a hobby of mine, but now I really enjoy it. My site isn't hosted on Neocities anymore even though I technically got my start there. I'll never "hate" Neocities especially because it was my entry point into web dev, but it's incredibly important to me that my site stays truly "my own" and that I'm able to disengage with the feed whenever I feel like it.

[hat]

Oh wow, so you had a view estimate you site should have?

I would put neocities right above neopets pet pages in terms of control. An actual webhost gives you MUCH more control and data. Neocities is super basic and isn't great other than being free and no deletion after inactivity. Not even offering FTP upload is awful imo. My neocities hit counter just hit 200k, but I take it with a grain of salt because those are surely 199k web crawler views.

It really is a lot of fun to design a place that is completely your own! I'm glad you're enjoying it and you took the time to learn HTML/CSS!

[DivergentRays]

I had a website that I created back in 1996 and I loved it! It was so much fun because I am passionate about my kitties, Tripod had all sorts of cool little add-ons like quote generators, and I was involved with webrings and Topsites. But over time I guess life just got in the way and I didn't keep up with the site and then it didn't seem that there were any more old school websites. It was all blogs and they didn't have the charm of the websites. Clearly I just wasn't looking in the right place because the homebrew kind of websites I was looking for never really went away.

I'd always missed it and decided that I was going to start one up again. Not sure how I found Neocities but I know I wanted to join a community of some sort and not just build a site and shout into the void.

Oooh, I have to edit because I just remembered how it was I found Neocities! Someone on Reddit posted to the r/InternetisBeautiful sub about a program they made where you could surf the net and find cool sites. It was sadgrl posting and it was her surf project - can't remember what is was called and she removed it from her site quite a while ago but that was my introduction to Neocities.

[PAINTKILLER]

Well.... My reasoning is multi-faceted.

1 - I got off social media and have a very small circle IRL, so I felt pretty alone and lonely without being able to interact the way social media affords people. To be clear, I don't regret leaving social media, best tech and quality of life decision I ever made. But it definitely left me feeling very alone and lonely - especially when not too many people bothered to keep in touch once I got off social media.

2 - I was - and still am to some degree - in a huge artist block. I couldn't and still can't draw or paint like I have more of my life and I needed some way to be creative before I went mad.

3 - I needed a place to vent and rant and ramble about my life. At the time of starting the site there was a lot going on personally that I wanted to vent about that I really didn't have a place to do.

4 - I somehow randomly stumbled on Neocities and it instantly reminded me of my time on Geocitieis and Tripod, especially, but also brought back mempries of BBS, Telnet, AIM, and a host of other eraly web stuff I used to partake in.

Once I realized creating a site on Neocities could address all those issues in one form or another, I decided I had to make a site. Since then, it's just become an addiciton, coping mechanism, and awesome community of cool people.

[Ame]

I already knew about neocities because my boyfriend had one (it was before the pandemic I think), but I never really cared about it. I never had an interest in web design as a hobby. (I saw a lot of people saying how they learnt HTML and pixel art by making neopet's petpages, but when I was on neopets I always used template layouts, and the same for tumblr lol). But then, I was fed up with doing frontend on my job then I decided to create a site so I make frontend the way I wanted to u.u

I vaguely know how websites were in the early 00's (I mean commercial websites, and not the personal ones) and liked them better than how they are today so I had this in mind when I was creating my neocities' page. But, I end up learning a lot about geocities and personal pages too.