I decided to make a new personal website. The last time I did this kind of thing was before the pandemic, and I did it with WordPress before, so my first instinct was to try WordPress again. But WordPress seems to have changed a lot since then. Or maybe I just forgot how annoying it is? Anyway, I found an interesting-looking theme to start with, but building on it is really frustrating.
Style changes don’t apply throughout the site when it seems like they should. I can’t change the font in the footer even though there’s a place where you can supposedly do that (you can select a new font but it changes nothing). I can’t move design elements around smoothly in the block editor, and I can’t seem to get out of the block editor either (although maybe that’s just a theme issue?). I’d like to make the background different on different parts of the same page, but I can’t figure out how to do that.
Am I going about this the wrong way? Do I need a different theme? A plugin? Should I use something other than WordPress? I’m annoyed with all of the AI stuff WordPress is pushing at me anyway. Do I just need to bite the bullet and teach myself CSS or whatever, given that I don’t want to vibe-code this site? Advice please!
edit: also, if there’s a better Lemmy community for this kind of question, please point me there!
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The question is how complex your personal website should be and how frequently you want to update it. A CMS gives you comfort in editing it, but you need to babysit the hell out of it, especially Wordpress.
I did my personal website just by myself. My both css files (regular and imprint) are together around 600 lines. It includes custom fonts (Google Fonts locally hosted), some animations and responsive design for smaller screens. My JS is 70 lines long and handles highlighting of the current site and an accordion. My site does work without JS. I do use PHP, mostly for including footer and header to each site. I did some crazy stuff as an experiment to protect my email and stuff, but it didn’t worked.
Lets be honest, with AI you could create a site with ease and without using a CMS and other fancy stuff, this will be safe. Just look what JS and other things do get included and be sure it’s nothing external. When you really want it to make it yourself, I would say learn the basics and copy stuff from themes and stuff like bootstrap.
Honestly though, I would say in these days, you don’t need a flashy theme. My theme is very simple. I have alternating light and dark backgrounds, to separate sections. Some good placements of objects, a different font and an accent color. The only thing I really don’t like is how much I wrote. But when I did it, there was no AI. But I must mention, that the leading dev of my company actually looked at my site and mentioned it that he liked it. I’m not sure if other companies where I applied, really looked at my site. The companies who did invite me only invited me to basically say that they have no room for an inexperienced dev. The company that took me said to me, I know the basic stuff and the rest I will learn.
Drop the bloated CMS. Build CSS and HTML only by hand, easy peasy. Learn flex box or grid CSS
honestly, looking up flex box makes me think that learning CSS might be less frustrating than dealing with this crappy WordPress interface… I think I could learn this https://www.w3schools.com/csS/css3_flexbox.asp
But I’d have to somehow host my site, though, right? I’ve never had to do that before, I just let WordPress handle that. I don’t think I’m ready to set up my own server… I have zero experience with anything like that and also only have one working computer right now. (My other, older laptop needs more expensive/extensive repair work than I thought.) Is there a hosting service you’d recommend? Or am I back to needing a “bloated CMS” that offers hosting?
check out neocities, maybe that will help?
I think I could learn this https://www.w3schools.com/csS/css3_flexbox.asp
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
this is the more “official” place to learn, and I’ve heard bad things about w3schools, but used it fine.
Wanna try
hugo? I can’t vouch for the others, but since I have tried it I can share my experiences… It’s not 100% as intuitive as Microsoft Word so there will be a learning curve, but it is reasonably simple & can scale up to professional web development quite well. Lots of templates out there too so for the most part you won’t need to make everything yourself. Some professional web devs use it too. But because it is also used professionally, AI is good at generating Hugo sites, so it may make your site look AI-my…Just a heads up though, most
hugothemes use JavaScript quite heavily; if you’re against JS by chance, you may need to dig a bit deeper into their themesWhat issue do people have with JavaScript? (Should I be against JavaScript?)
Note: This is from the perspective of 30 years of web design, which is not to say I’m an expert, just that while I do personal projects, much of my time has been spent designing for small businesses and the like. I think it’s a good way to go, mind.
If you want to learn coding by hand, you probably don’t want to bite off learning HTML and CSS from scratch. Use a framework like Bootstrap (there are plenty of frameworks to choose from), which gives you a good baseline of CSS to start with.
If I was using something like Bootstrap, to get different backgrounds in different parts of the page - this is what “section” divs are for, because you can assign a background to each section. Well, this is true of divs in general, but in the Bootstrap contet you have sections. Inside sections you have rows, and then inside that you have columns. That’s how you can set up the parts of your page, with content going in different subdivisions of the page.
If you prefer a more visual way of working, I can recommend WordPress and Divi 5 (specifically as opposed to Divi 4), although the latter is not free. But it is a highly flexible solution that gives you the power of WordPress on the backend, but a pretty darn good builder on the front end.
If you want a simple blog, try static site generators like Jekyll or Hugo. Both are FOSS. Once you set up theme and other things, you just write your post or article in markdown, and the site generator will create full HTML website for you, and you can use something like codeberg pages to publish it for free.
If you want something more, you can look at Ghost CMS, which is also FOSS.
Youre a real one
seconding on the static site generator advice.
also i personally found serendipity more comfier than wordpress personally, might be worth checking
What are you looking to do with the page?
Do you want a blog? Or do you just want a more static page?
It will definitely have a blog. Probably some other projects eventually (TBD which ones, but I’ll at least want to display photos nicely). I also want to make the site colorful if possible, maybe a little offbeat-looking.
I respect a person who blogs, honestly. Put your thoughts into words and share with others for free. Love that sh—. 📝 Simple concept that can benefit so many.
Alright, so it has to be a dynamic page.
Is there a particular reason for wanting WordPress?
It will require some constant upkeep to keep is secure, a more lightweight alternative might be a better option.
Mostly just that I registered my domain through there. (It’s one I bought in the past but allowed to lapse, and then I was pleasantly surprised to find it was still available so I bought it again… in retrospect, I probably should have waited to play around with current-day WordPress some more before buying through there.) But I can still move my site with its domain name off WordPress, right?
Note that these days WordPress has options to keep itself and its themes and plugins updated, so you can basically generally forget about it.
Why would a lightweight alternative need less upkeep?
To the OP: you might consider ClassicPress, which is a fork of WordPress without the block editor.
WordPress is so large and constantly attacked that there is a joke that it is a remote access tool for hackers that also as a side benefit also runs a decent web management system
While it is a constant target, you can also set it so that it updates itself, themse, and plugins automatically. I haven’t had a site successfully attacked in nearly a decade now, and at my height I was hosting more than 100 small business sites.
then you should be good, dont worry about criticism of others that might know what they are talking about; they look shifty to me and are probly bots
I’m confused by your comment, but as to others’ opinions of WordPress: In my humble opinion, they are not so much wrong, but out of date to some degree, and to another degree, there are lots of people that set up WordPress and don’t set it to auto-update, thus almost ensuring that at some point they will get hacked. So it’s ignorance - in the sense strictly of a lack of knowledge - not stupidity.
By choosing WordPress, a person is choosing a larger target for hacks; but I believe setting it up correctly (which is not difficult) largely prevents that. Others may disagree, as is their right. :)
