heres a few links from my bookmarks folder full of HTML and CSS resources that i used when first making my neocities website because i want other people to make their own sites as well because its fun :)
how to actually do html and css
web design in 4 minutes - this is the site that really made HTML and CSS click for me, following along as the author describes what’s he’s doing to the webpage and showing how it changes the presentation (you don’t need the book he shills at the end. i did without)
w3schools introduction to html - takes you through the very basics of creating a website, lesson-by-lesson. big goldmine for code to grab and scaffold off of once you have some basic skills
mozilla’s html guide - also a great beginner’s guide by the people who made mozilla, although i didnt use it as much as w3 schools
brackets.io - this is the program i use to write the files i use for my website. lets you do splitscreen to work with two files at once, gives you a breakdown of all the files in your website’s folder, and will let you autofill commonly-used tags and files in the code. supposedly has a live preview function but it doesnt work that well for me when i’m using a second monitor, which i normally do when coding. just save the file and refresh the page instead.
(side note: i work in a software external to neocities instead of directly in the neocities editor because 1. local files update with a refresh and neocities has to update the cookies AND download all the website info again once you update, and 2. it effectively gives you a mass undo button if you fuck up because you have your files hosted in multiple places (local and online). yes its kinda annoying to have to manually upload all my files especially bc you cant upload whole folders AND you cant move their locations once uploaded but i prefer it to working directly on the site. if you have a neocities pro subscription ($5/month) you can mount your website directly on your machine as opposed to the neocities dashboard, which basically means you dont have to manually upload the code every time you change something – it’ll update automatically)
codepen - if you prefer something browser-based to work in then try codepen, i used it a little bit at the beginning when trying to troubleshoot some code i didn’t quite understand. you need an account to actually save your work and im not sure if it actually lets you upload folders bc i never signed up lol
premade engines/sites/themes/etc etc
neothemes or eggramen or templaterr - if you wanna get a quick start on a neocities site, you CAN use a theme generator/premade theme. if you go this route i would still heavily recommend trying to learn HTML and CSS, and then go into the guts of your own website to try and pick it apart and change it to your liking
zonelets - a static blogging engine that uses HTML, CSS, and javascript. made for use on neocities but theoretically useable elsewhere. takes about 15 minutes to set up (if you use a default theme, but its pretty customizable if you know what you’re doing) and requires you to 1. write blog posts in html and 2. modify some code in a script file every time you want to upload a post, but it will automatically let you browse posts in order once you get everything uploaded
rarebit - a neocities webcomic template — havent used it yet but looks cool, and seems to operate off of the same principles as zonelets.
glightbox - this is the lightbox javascript code i use when i want to display a lot of images on one page. i found this code via clicking “inspect element” on a neocities fanpage that the webmaster drew a lot of fanart for. you should click inspect element on neocities pages that you like so you can understand how they do what you like (you can even look at their css by clicking the style.css link you have to include at the top of your page)
plus a couple masterlists/directories:
sadgrl.online’s webmastery directory
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
2087
vaporwave
germansingergirl
stormborns
