make-a-website
Mission Statement / Manifesto
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It’s 2023, the internet has been around for something like 40 years. But the modern web consists of mostly just a few websites, just a few enormous platforms that everyone visits day to day. Many users only ever visit Google, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Reddit, and a few other sites and apps. There’s not much room for users to be creative with their personal spaces on these platforms, they get little more than the ability to upload custom profile pictures and write short custom bios. Everything looks the same, everything uses the same underlying technologies… there is often little to set any one page apart from any other. But it wasn’t always this way.
In the ’90s and early ’00s, the internet was a far more personal, creatively diverse, and interesting place. Back then, a huge portion of the internet were individuals’ personal websites hosted on places like GeoCities and Angelfire. These people were usually not professional web developers, but because html is so easy to learn and because services like GeoCities offered free hosting space to anyone who wanted it, creating personal websites was extremely accessible for huge amounts of people. Like, at the peak of GeoCities’ existence, it hosted more than 38 million pages!
GeoCities is often considered the first social network, although it was nothing like modern social media platforms. People poured love into their personal sites and learned and practiced skills to make and keep them updated. People posted personal pictures, family memories, inner thoughts, secret dreams, and virtually anything else you can imagine. These were passion projects for many people, and they were important to many more people. Could any of those personal websites compare to the popularity of mainstream social media in the modern day? Probably not. But being popular wasn’t necessarily the point of the personal websites back then. It was just fun. It was new. It was creative and inspiring! Ask your parents or grandparents. If they were online in 1999, they probably had a GeoCities or knew someone who did. With a gleam in their eye, they’ll probably love to show you their old site: to see it again, and share its contents with someone new once more.
Nowadays people use social media and the internet in general to consume more than to create. These platforms are often stages for a few corporations or popular people to post content that the rest of the internet’s population consumes. The overwhelming majority of users post and interact somewhat infrequently in comparison. You’re bombarded with ads on social media, and often the ads can be hard to tell apart from the content. Companies want your money so much that they pretend to be relatable personalities: famously the Twitter account of Wendy’s is quirky and sarcastic. Many TikTok and Youtube creators have been flooded with controversy for making ads about products without telling their audiences that they were ads. The atmospheres of these platforms are also just in general often seen as very negative or downright toxic. Sites like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and TikTok are often cited directly as negatively effecting peoples’ anxiety, causing them serious emotional or mental distress, and sometimes even worse.
Which culture would you prefer? Does the social web we’ve built benefit actual, ordinary people? It may be the case that the peak of social media, its best form, the form that had the most positive effect it could have on users and the world in general, was before the rise of the current mainstream social platforms. I believe the best form of social activity online might have been before the rise of current social platforms that treat users as a product and fundamentally enforce an atmosphere of competition via algorithms. Modern social media dehumanizes and commodifies users, it divides and excludes. Modern social media is built for advertisers and corporations, not for people. You and your data, both private and public, is a currency and a product for soulless corporate entities to profit from. But the web of the past was one where people were put first, because it was made by people, for people.
I want to see the personal web rise again, I want to see people creating and maintaining personal websites in their free time for fun. I want personal websites to exist alongside regular social media, if not completely replace it, and I want anyone who wants to have a website, to have a website. I want to help make the process of making a website more accessible, and I want to help make it seem less daunting or overwhelming to beginners. This repo will serve as a tool for that purpose through simple guides and tutorials on how to code html and css, free open source templates that people can use, and lists of helpful resources.
