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how to get into websites

ka3 asked:

hi hi! this is so random but i've been wanting to get into website creation/design and am really unfamiliar with the technical side of things. i found y'all's site through the toki pona lessons page and overall liked the site design, so i wanted to ask what you two used to build the website and if there are any resources you might recommend for someone hoping to learn? thank you

hi! thanks for the ask!!!

i'll answer what i use to make websites now at the bottom of the post, but the way i do it is definitely not something i'd recommend starting out. its very needlessly overcomplicated, when you can accomplish a lot of stuff with less! so i'll tell u about how i got started with websites instead!

how i started websites

the way to start out is basically just learning about HTML and CSS! javascript might be something you wanna learn about later, but you dont need it early on.

HTML is what determines the stuff that's on your website, and how its generally structured, and CSS changes how it looks!

when i started with websites, i benefited a lot from w3schools.com. they have an html tutorial and a css tutorial. when i started making websites, i didnt go through these entire tutorials to begin with, i just started making the website i wanted, and only read the amount i needed from the tutorials to do, like, the next basic step. so like, first i made a heading that said "hi welcome to my website", then i added some links and styled them, etc.

but the most important thing is searching things up! for basically any challenge you'll ever face, there will be someone out there who's asked how to do it online! if you search "how to make text pink css", there will be tons of helpful results!

the last tool i love, is just right-clicking people's websites and clicking "inspect". that'll show you their exact html and css, and its a great way to learn how to do cool things, by just seeing exactly how someone else did it! it wont work very well on all websites though. for example, it wont work on websites that use static site generators.

speaking of static site generators, that might be better than writing the html yourself, depending on your goals!

static site generators

static site generators will generally let you generate a whole website using markdown files and styling! its especially useful if you'll have a lot of pages that will be structured similarly, like a blog! ive never really used a static site generator, but zoe used hugo for a while, which let her make a pretty good website! the drawback of this compared to writing everything from scratch, is that you'll have less direct control over every detail.

ive also seen some people using bearblog, which (from what i understand) is a really lightweight thing for if all you're doing is blogging. i assume thats not the case with you, though, so i think you'd probably benefit more from writing the html and css yourself, or using hugo. personally i really loved the feeling of making a whole website from the ground up in html, so im biased towards that. but zoe loved hugo.

how i do website now

since you asked how i make my website, i'll answer that too! but note that this is needlessly complicated, and i dont think the vast majority of people would benefit from making websites the way i do.

to make my website, i use nuxt, nuxt content, daisyui, and tailwindcss!

nuxt is like an entire website framework, and it can do a lot of stuff. its especially useful to make, like, very dynamic websites. nuxt content is an addon to nuxt, that lets me write posts in markdown files! i like it. daisyui and tailwindcss let me easily do like, responsive design (the website adapting to smaller screen sizes), and have a darkmode and a lightmode. but you can do all that in normal html and css too. the only thing you cant do w/ normal html and css is write posts as markdown files, but even then theres easier ways to accomplish the same thing, like with hugo or bearblog.

i also found nuxt useful for making my toki pona course, because it let me streamline the process for accepting translations, and let me simplify some things that were kind of a headache when i was making it from scratch. i do think i couldve solved many of those problems with hugo instead though!


that's all i could think of at the moment! if you have any more questions, feel free to ask!! whether its in the comments of this post, or another ask, or e-mail, i'll be happy to help!

ka3

thanks so much for taking the time to write all that out! really appreciate it and i'll look into those programs