Building a website
Hello. it's been a little while since the first post. I haven't got a idea of what to write about these days, but now it seems I got the perfect opportunity! I started building a website!
Why a website? As a game developer, it is important to have a place to direct viewers interested in my content. For all these years I thought that having social media was enough, but it is not for several reasons:
- Social media is algorithm-driven. This means the content we post often end completely ignored if it doesn't please the platform algorithm, or if we post at the wrong time, with the wrong tags... all of this wastes our time and energy and leads to frustration. A single person handling a social media account can't spend the whole day with this silly game just to get noticed on the internet.
- Social media are efemeras. It may disapear with your content from day to night without notice, ban you for subjetive reasons.
- They lack customization, leaving your public to mindless scroll your profile to see your stuff.
- Plus, if a host service is closing we can simply download the whole site and host it somewhere else. While a social media would demand us to manually save everything.
Already having this in mind, someone recently reminded me the existence of Neocities and that was all I need to start.
As someone that lived the early internet days I can say that internet used to be a much more friendlier place, with lots of people creating their personal websites on geocities, doing stuff without following standards, being free to commit mistakes and express themselves. That was fun to see, differently from modern websites that all look bland, sad, and without personality.
So, how to start? I barely touched html on the past, so I have to learn everything all by myself? Luck for me, Neocities provides a newbie tutorial that helped me get over the initial resistance. After that I done some googling and found a site template targeted to Neocities users. It is always easier to start by editing somebody else code than by doing everything from scratch.
I'm slowly getting on hang of it, learning the html elements, planing the page layout, it feels like I'm learning something new again after so many years stuck on a routine. It scares us at first, but feels good after a while.
My goal is to focus on game development related content, talk about the games I created in more details, provide links, share some gamedev knowledge with other developers... I think I will keep a more personal talking approach on this blog. I'm linking this blog on my site.
Almost forgot, since I'm dealing with neocities will do something that I have been wanting for a longe time, that is say "f*** you" to modern standards and personalize my website in a way that it looks aesthetically pleasing, but without killing the readability like some sites do. It will be a nice art exercise for me haha.
I hope one day together we will be able to move way from the hyper simplified design and revive the old design where every site we visit exhales its own personality.
Oh, right, the site link is here
That's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the reading.