I wanted to draw some more attention to a few sites that got mentioned briefly during the stream today! Or rather, a few platforms where you can start making your own websites.
First, Jess mentioned Glitch.com. Glitch is super cool because you can create your own websites from scratch, but you can also browse other people’s projects and “remix” them, using their code as a starting point to create your own version. (If you’re familiar with Github, it’s like forking a project.) Or just tinker around in their code to see how it works!
A lot of the projects on Glitch use Javascript or frameworks or other fancy stuff we haven’t seen yet, so that might be confusing. If you’re feeling brave, it can be super cool to just browse the front page and look at the source code of any project that seems neat! But here are some suggestions for less-confusing ones:
- The template called Hello Website is a nice basic one to start out with, while still including a readme with some instructions about how to use Glitch. It was made by the creators of Glitch.
- Or if you want a true blank slate with no surprises, similar to what FreeCodeCamp gives you when you start a new lesson, then remix this project that contains empty HTML and CSS files only.
- If you want to try remixing a site that actually has some content already, but that is still basic enough to understand with only what we learned so far in this bootcamp, then check out this pair of projects called Intro to HTML and Intro to CSS. They’re two different versions of a simple website for announcing a new year’s resolution. Plus they have a quick review of HTML/CSS basics in their readme files, which makes them really convenient to start building from!
By the way, I think Jess linked to a specific Glitch page during the stream, but I didn’t catch what it was. If anyone has that link, maybe you can post it in this thread?
And then there was another site I mentioned in the chat, called Neocities. This is a lot more straightforward and “old school” than Glitch: they just give you a simple text editor and a place to build your own website from scratch. Neocities is a perfect place to make your first website using only the skills we learned this week, because their philosophy is all about the idea that these simple building blocks are all you really need to create an enjoyable website. Neocities is also all about bringing back the spirit of what the web was like before things got so standardized, back when everybody’s homepages looked weird and different from each other–which makes it a perfect place to goof up and make your beginner mistakes, or to go out of your comfort zone and try something weird! Weird is normal here!
Glitch and Neocities are both free, and both of them will host your website for you in addition to having a built-in text editor where you can write your HTML/CSS.
I would encourage folks to go ahead and start diving in to making your own personal projects right away! (But only if you can spare the time and energy, of course! The bootcamp is definitely a lot of work already, so it’s reasonable if extra projects sound overwhelming right now.) Even if you’re brand new to this, don’t underestimate yourself–we totally have learned enough already, just with this week’s lessons, to make some real web pages! And when I’ve looked up advice before on how to learn to code, the biggest tip I saw repeated over and over is that creating your own projects is the best way to learn.
PS, I apologize if this thread is too off topic! I don’t mean to distract you all away from the course itself! I just really love these two platforms and want to see more new-developer content in the world haha.
