I don't care much for the attention social media brings. Being an influencer is a challenging job. When I was trying to find a place to publish my creative writing, I did not want to post it on any populated forums. I had always intended to post my writing under an anonymous pseudonym but I wanted to take it a step further. I wanted to code a website people would have to look for.
Greatly motivated by my desire to move away from social media, I combed through various resources that taught its readers HTML and CSS. My primary sources were Codecademy and W3Schools but I also picked up some tips from very kind Neocities users who had shared some of their code.
I am very much somebody who enjoys learning how something works by poking at it myself. So peering into the code of somebody's website, prodding at the code, seeing what broke and what didn't as a result of my tampering, was the fastest way I could learn. I also used this strategy a lot when first experimenting with Ren'Py.
I first spent a lot of my time meticulously going through Codecademy's HTML course. I completed the first part of the HTML section, then skipped over to the CSS course to learn the basics. I was very eager to actually code the website itself. This resulted in a lot of trial and error in the beginning. An image wouldn't be sized correctly or a piece of text would be out of place. Each time I had to consult various documentation to fix the problem. Then, much like learning a language, I was able to understand what various tags and properties did by seeing them in action over and over. In a matter of days, I was no longer looking at the documentation for reference. I was able to retain the information incredibly quickly.
The site you see now is the result of all of that work. I wanted to keep it simple. Adding too many details and aesthetics would distract from the point of the site.