A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck. That’s in part because our perception of what websites should be has changed so dramatically over the last 20 years. The “Hard” Way It’s easy to forget how simple a website can be. A website can be just one page. It doesn’t even need CSS. You don’t need a content management system like Wordpress. All you have to do is write some HTML and drag that file to a server over FTP. For years now, people have tried to convince us that this is the “hard” way of making a website, but in reality, it may be the easiest. It doesn’t have to be super complicated. However, with this post, I will assume you’ve written at least some HTML and CSS before, and that you know how to upload files to a server. If you’ve never done these things, it may seem like I’m skipping over some things. I am. Baby’s First HTML Let me begin with what I think you shouldn’t start with. Don’t shop around for a CMS. Don’t even design or outline your website. Don’t buy a domain or hosting yet. Don’t set up a GitHub repository; I don’t care how fast you can make one. Instead, just write your first blog post. The very first thing I did was open TextEdit and write my first post with HTML, ye olde way. Not with Markdown. Not with Nova or BBEdit or another code editor. Just TextEdit (in plain text). Try it, even if just this once. It’s kinda refreshing. You can go back to using a code editor later. Here’s what a draft of this blog post looks like: <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="utf-8"> <title>How to Make a Damn Website</title> </head> <body> <h1><a href="how-to-make-a-damn-website.html">How to Make a Damn Website</a></h1> <p>A lot of people want to make a website but don’t know where to start or they get stuck.</p> </body> </html> This is honestly all you need. It’s kind of charming. Make sure you rely exclusively on HTML elements for your formatting. Your page should render clearly with raw HTML. Do not...
First seen: 2026-01-13 20:07
Last seen: 2026-01-13 22:07