I can't recall how or when I fell in love with the idea of taking control of a little corner of the internet. What I do remember is typing, over and over again, “how to make a web page for free” into the search bar — taking a course or following random tutorials that led me to a basic HTML with a “Hello World!” in ugly plain text… and then forgetting about it for months.
On one of those impulsive searches, about a year and a half ago, I found The Odin Project a full-fledged learning course with hundreds of well explained resources and, most importantly… FREE. I started doing a couple of lessons every day during the dead hours at my boring job. Before I realized it, I had finished a course and felt pretty comfortable messing around with simple example sites, creating files and folders in the terminal with zero prior experience in Linux.
In the middle of that process, I discovered Neocities. With my very basic knowledge, I felt like I finally had the pieces to build my own site…
I was wrong.
Exploring Neocities is a huge rabbit hole. You can find simple and beautiful websites and fever dreams like Axayacatl (in the best possible way). But I didn’t even know how to make my header appear on every page. How was I supposed to build and maintain a whole website with that level of coding?
Well… with a lot of trial and error...
Most of my research started in the Neocities learning tab: clicking on something I didn’t understand, hitting my head against the wall trying to figure it out, giving up after a couple of days… and then repeating the process!
My first major breakthrough came when I found a tutorial on 11ty. I don’t understand what kind of black magic is behind a Static Site Generator, but in a couple of hours I had a site up and running — structured, organized, and much easier to maintain.
It wasn’t my style, though.
The next step was jumping between every Neocities page I found interesting: LocalGhost, Daliwali, Twelve Men, Koilwood, Xsolimini, Strflr, and Nomnomnami. This last one was especially helpful for learning. The layout is beautiful and simple enough to try to replicate. I spent hours in the DevTools trying to understand how things worked and how to recreate some elements with my own hands.
That process led me to a simple layout — basic, but full of potential — ready to be filled with cool stuff and published on Neocities.
The tutorial I followed was useful but incomplete, so I had to find another guide to set up GitHub Actions and automate the upload to Neocities. That was the easiest part of the whole process. Both guides are a must-read if you're interested in using a static site generator.
The rest was the long part: personalizing every detail, defining colors and fonts, building the header, implementing RSS, adding a comment section to my blog posts, and discovering a bunch of interesting features along the way.
It’s absolutely worth the effort to build a web page and refine all those details — but I realized something: that wasn’t my original intention. I wanted a space for my ideas to live on the internet. At some point, I lost that focus and spent a loooooong time obsessing over the technical side.
Don’t get me wrong — I read a lot of personal blogs, and I admire how people invest time improving their sites, implementing creative ideas. For many of them, the site itself is the final product.
But for me… the site is just the house.
My ideas are not CSS and HTML. They are words and images.
So I’m excited to start writing silly blog posts and sharing my creations with whoever is interested. For now, the foundation of this webpage is done… at least until the lines of code call me again to break everything and rebuild it from scratch.
And that’s a beautiful thought.
This place is so mine that I can destroy it and remake it from the ground up whenever I want.
If you’re here because you typed “How to make a web page for free”… try it. Make something. It’s time.
Thank you for being here.