Craft your own website

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Revision as of 20:31, 13 March 2026 by Valentin97 (talk | contribs)

Craf your own website (workshop poster).jpg

Craft your own website

"My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously."

Laure Schwulst, 2018

MORNING

Intro

  • Who we are? Gossip round about websites.

Lucas and Balint graduated from ArtEZ Graphic Design. This is where we learned about coding website from scratch. We believe that sharing knowledge about technology empowers people who use these technologies. Knowing how to build a website can be a starting point to understand the internet as systems of infrastructures.

  • We keen on to know why did you sign up and what do you know about websites? Where do you learnd about it?

Neocities.org

History
The spirit of neocities.org comes from the 90's/2000's Geocities, which was a platform where people could craft their own website and share it with eachother. We can think of it neighbourhoods of websites link together in a loose manner, very much community oriented organisation.

Geocities was the third most visited website back then -> yahoo.com buys them -> death of Geocities in 2009 -> revive the spirit of geocities in 2013 as neocities.org initiated by Kyle Drake.

The spirit:

The death of Geocities.png

Cultural significance
It is not a coincidence that we are hosting this workshop at De Kurk - the local queer bar in Arnhem. There is an interestin connection to explore between physical queer places and neocities.org as a queer place for personal/individual websites.

"Building a site involves coding, but also creative strategy for page layout, image use, focal points, colour motifs and other decisions not too far off from curating a show, or designing a visual arts magazine, the difference being that no one decides how things look except for you."

" personalised sites, many users have used Neocities to house different parts of the art industry digitally, often promoting their zines, curating art in cyber galleries and sharing their portfolios"

" users are brought together through community ‘webrings’, small hyperlinked widgets attached to their pages."

Webrings

Before google's search engine there was a very different way to browes the internet. Webrings are a very apparent method of connecting websites together, like a ringroad in the neighbourhood.

"pre-Google days, search kind of sucked"

Commercialazation of the web creates certain ways of interctin with the web.

"users decided to self-organize their pages through lightly-organized “rings” that would lead users to pages on a similar topic. Having a link somewhere on your site that ensured users that your page was a way station in a series of pages on a similar theme."

"when the ring gets big enough—it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring ‘intact’ when pages go down.”"

"Web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are batty about a favorite hobby"

Webrings vs. search engines.png

Let have a break for lunch and browse neocities in the meantime.

AFTERNOON

Let's craft

Register a User

  • go to [1]
  • Fill in:
    • Your-Site-Name
    • Password
    • e-mail adress
    • confirm e-mail

HTML

HTML tutorial.png

CSS

Inspect element Take some time to browes and look around on other websites and try to apply CSS to your website.

WEBRING

  • [ Craft Your Own Website - Webring tutorial]

Technical rider

Hardware

  • Laptops
  • HDMI Cable
  • Screen
  • Extension chord
  • Table for at least 10 people
  • Maybe separate extention for Display + our laptops
  • 1 shared laptop to type code on + to show
  • Internet connection

Software

Tutorials:

Resources:

Situating articles:

Net art examples:

Archive

Agenda for 13-03-2026

  • [] update tutorials with metaphores
  • [] go through planning
  • [] go trough techrider

Agenda for 07-03-2026

Cherry picking of refererences:

  • [x] read through the articles and anotate them (craft focus)
  • [x] make tech rider (hardware software)
  • [x] write intro (incl. cherry picked references)
  • [x] make an example wesite (show the codeand what it does) HTML+ CSS
  • [x] make another website for the we(b)ring (we)bring
  • [] update the workshop plan :
    • [x] sharing experiences about coding
    • [x] neocities: history and culture exploration round of sifferent websites and inspect!! to learn from each other (early internet aesthetics)
    • [x] tags HTML
    • [x] and CSS
    • [x] webring
    • [] presentation moment applouse

1. Everyday tech!

The workshop is using laptops and internet connection to learn basic HTML and CSS at https://neocities.org/ . At the moment we are two people me (valentin) and a friend of mine Lucas.

2. Place!

There is currently three possible hosts in Arnhem which is outside of the usual art school bubble:

THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE IT IS GOING TO HAPPEN:

  • De Kurk - Queer cafe which is still somewhat connected to the art scene but there are many different people hang out there. Has a fast internet connection which is quite unsecured (prefect choice haha)
  • ABC Libertas - Another cafe in Arnhem which is also a secondhand bookstore, usually people who go there have children and they are not related to the art scene altough they are located in the "Fashion District" the Mode Kartier. They have okay internet connection, and they told me that they not necesserily want 10 people to sit at one table with a computer (too much office vibes, as they say).
  • Rozet - Rozet is the public library in Arnhem which also hosts different kind of events. This is a well established insttitute and huge building with five floors and good but very much like Eduroam internet connection.
  • Communal Garden - ??? (no wifi, no electircity)

3. Crowd!

This is absolutely for people who doesn't know anything about building websites, but they want one (for themselves or their own hobbies or business). Maximum 10 people so we can pay attention and help out with questions, also to keep it intimate.


4. Publishing!

We will use https://neocities.org/ which is nice because the websites will be publicly available immediately. The documentation of the workshop will be uploaded here to this wiki page, and probably will appear in our portfolio website in a way...

For communication

  • posters
  • flyers
  • social media stories

For documentation

  • etherpad for sure
  • pictures
  • updating this wikipage with observation and reflection on how it went

5. Schedule

On one of these dates (weekends): 28th of February, or the 1st 14th or 15th of March? from 11:00 till 16:00.

The day:

Start:

  • Who we are, why are we doing this?
  • What is the internet?
  • Introduction (regisetering to neocities)

Morning:

What is HTML?

These are the tags to start with:

  • Head is for visitors to identify your website, basically the title. (The name of the building)
  <head></head>
  • Body is where we define some structure (rooms) and put all the content (furnitures).
  <body></body>
  • Write a two sentences that describes what is your website is about
  <p
  • Linking your website to other websites and/or social media profile .
  <a href="https://blabla.bla"></a>
  • Let others contact with you!
  <a href="mailto:bla@bla.bla"></a>
  • Make an inventory (hobbies, services, topics)
  <li
  • Put a picture of anything related to your website (usin online and local url)
  <img src="" alt=""

What is CSS?

  • Neocities has a really nice welcome text for introducing CSS, just read that out loud.
  • Basic CSS syntax:
  body{
  background-color: pink;
  }
  • link CSS to HTML (How HTML recognizes which CSS file to use?)

Afternoon:

  • Show how to inspect websites (to steal ideas haha)
  • Carry on designing
  • Adressing individual questions
  • IS THERE A DEMAND FOR A SECOND ROUND?

Discussions

Questions regards planning:

  • How to reach people outside of school bubble?
  • Technical rider?
  • Going through the planning and the tags to teach.
  • Talk about scattered pedagogy as a way of teaching about technology.

Comment from Doriane


Discussion with Lucas

  • establish webrings (at the start?)
  • what do you know about websites?
  • have you ever made any of your own websites
  • knowing how to code your own websites is very empowering, also because you can really put your own style into it. And really make your website your own. You see that a lot around Neocities, that website makes really share a part of their personality through their website, and use it as a form of self-expression. Which you can't really achieve by using website builders / social media.
    • knowing the infrastructure behind it, you start being critical, and realising the potential of you can do with it.
  • website making is a craft. owning the craftmanship.
  • https://thehtml.review/04/
  • https://www.blairs.computer/
  • https://lucasorigami.github.io/manifesto/
  • https://wizardzines.com/
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