advice/help/guides for building a website (clueless)

[agentorange]

I want to try building my own website but I don't want to use those free website templates like Wix or Squarespace. I was considering registering a domain with Domain.com, since they seem cheap and simple, and starting from there. Is there anything to know before purchasing a domain name (i do at least know that purchasing a domain doesn't mean I now have a website, but anything else)? I was considering using Google Domains but apparently they've sold themselves to Squarespace so I was worried there might be some complications when they switch everything over. Does it even matter where you purchase a domain?

Looking for any tutorials/guides and such for getting started with HTML, CSS. My ideal website would look something like: http://advsys.net/ken/
https://www.vgmerchandise.com/store/home.php?cat=1
http://www.cad-red.com/jpn/

[rusty_shackleford]

I'd suggest starting out with neocities: https://neocities.org/
Yes, I'm being entirely serious. Disregard whatever you think of when you hear the term due to 'geocities'. It's entirely free, ad-less hosting with many integrated tools to aid learning.

They even have a tutorial available:
https://neocities.org/tutorials

Also if you want to keep using it you can just become a supporter($5/mo) which enables custom domain support. Or just take the knowledge somewhere else.

Porkburn is a good choice for a domain registrar btw
https://porkbun.com

[Lutte]

https://gohugo.io/

Use a static webpage generator. If you're making a website to share information, not to create an interactive web application, this is the safest and easiest route. You don't need to learn much html/css because it uses markdown for formatting stuff. There's a shitton of templates for Hugo out there that look really, really nice and aren't too hard to tweak. It's not quite like squarespace, since it's open source software you run locally and can easily modify to your liking (there's no limit as to how websites can look with Hugo).

Here's a few examples you can start with that I think would fit your tastes :
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/archie/
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/simplog/
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo-theme-terminal/
https://themes.gohugo.io/themes/hugo.386/
https://github.com/victoriadrake/neofeed-theme
Understand that they're all nice starting points. You can do anything you want from there.

If you need just a tiny bit of dynamism on your page, like a comment section, you don't need to host it yourself, include a JS import like disqus
https://gohugo.io/content-management/comments/
or what Rusty suggested to me on irc,
https://github.com/utterance/utterances

Neocities is a great place to upload the result of Hugo's static generation. You can write down some shell scripts to automate uploading your shit whenever you update the pages, neocities supports REST APIs.
https://neocities.org/api

Don't use wordpress, it's one of the worst piece of shit in the world, there's constant findings of 0day bugs people use to fuck with wordpress users. On the other hand, static pages generated by something like Hugo are safe.

For domains, two of the cheapest providers of .com are porkbun and cloudflare. They're reliable services, unlike jewgle which has shown time and time again even their paid services can be dropped.

[revenant]

You don't even need any external resources to have a website if you have a static IP, just code your website in HTML, fire up an apache instance and you're good to go. If you want a domain or hosting down the road you can just buy them then and upload your website there.

[2factorauth]

svelte!

[Goth-Girl-Supremacy]

Can't wait to not visit it.