In 2025, my friend introduced me to Neocities, a back-to-basics way of hosting a website using html. I already had a very basic grasp of html – I can underline words and add hyperlinks (haha, that’s most of it) – but as Neocities also uses CSS for styling, I was significantly out of my comfort zone!
So this year, I tasked myself with growing my HTML and CSS knowledge – with a little help from a techie husband, online guides, and some templates. What I love about Neocities is the community really encourages individuality, and celebration of passions and hobbies. There are also pages entirely for browsing graphics and icons to add personality to your own page (Sakura Dreams is a personal favourite).
Of course, my website focuses on reading, with a video game log and bank of Postcrossing postcards too. There’s room for improvement across all the pages. Sometimes changes I make don’t work, but I enjoy the process of going through the code and tweaking lines to see if I can improve things.
A few things I’d like to work on over the next year:
Resize the scrollbar window on the Postcards page – this currently feels too narrow compared to the other pages, but I struggled with the code to make it both wide and scrolling. Something new to learn!
Create a more interesting homepage
Build one page entirely from scratch, with no scaffolding from templates
Visit my Neo City here (ideally viewed on computer not mobile, as it doesn’t have a very reliable mobile mode – something else to work on during 2026!):
https://pageturner.neocities.org/
Sign up for your own Neocities website here (it’s free): https://neocities.org/
